Stuff You Should Know - The Alien Abduction Phenomenon of the Mid-20th Century

Episode Date: March 14, 2024

It started with New Hampshire couple Betty and Barney Hill, who learned under hypnosis they’d been abducted and examined by aliens in 1962. Since then, possibly millions of people in the US alone came to believe they followed in the Hills’ footsteps. Why?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. I'm a cognitive scientist and I've written 10 books and hundreds of articles on topics such as intelligence, introversion and education. The Psychology Podcast is a place where we investigate the different ways in which we can unlock human potential and where I get to interview some of the most extraordinary and fascinating people. And we have real conversations about what it means to achieve success and what it means to be human. Listen to the psychology podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple the secrets she's been waiting to reveal. Two Jersey Jays. From menopause to making the most of your 40s and 50s, follow these fabulous women as they navigate family, friendships, and even frenemies.

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It's pretty much the new status quo, which I have to say I like a lot. That makes this Stuff you should know. Oh, I was about to say, Jerry might get her feelings hurt, but you know she won't even hear that. No, not a chance. If she's not, you know, overseeing that episode, it's not like she goes, oh, I should listen in. Yeah, I gotta keep up with these guys, they're so hilarious.

That's not a Jerry thing to think. Yeah, especially when it's more alien stuff. Yeah, we've done a lot of alien stuff, and by God, every second of it's been amazing. And I don't think this is going to be any different, if you ask me. No, it's been a while, though. We haven't, I feel like we kind of had a little grouping of those, you know, 10 years ago or something. I think it was like last year, but we did. Was it really

No, it was probably like within the last two years. We did that to parter on project blue book. Oh sure I just remember years ago at Comic-Con. Didn't we do an alien thing there? We did one on UFOs. Yeah. Yeah for sure That's it. That's a brave thing for us to do at Comic-Con for sure A lot of experts there, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, today we're talking about something that definitely has a lot to do with aliens, a lot to do with UFOs, but also really has a lot to do with social psychology and sociology and history.

There's a strange moment in time where there was a, you can almost call it a trend. And I want to say right from the outset, we are in no way, shape or form, mocking anyone who believes that they were abducted. After researching this, I fully understand that people who, who believe they were abducted by aliens are traumatized by that experience and show all the symptoms of a traumatic experience. And then on top of that, have the indignity of not being believed by anybody

and probably talked down to fairly frequently. So we're gonna try not to talk down. So I'm not, in calling it a trend, I'm not trying to diminish the experience of anybody who believes they were abducted and that it had an impact on their lives. But there was a period in time from about the 1960s and 70s through to the 90s where there were a lot of people running around claiming to have been abducted. Yeah, it's interesting. It's fascinating because it dawned on me when I was researching this,

like I just haven't had, I haven't heard one of these in a long time. No, and I looked up and saw a bunch of different places that people attribute that to the advent of ubiquitous camera phones. That's inconvenient. Yeah, exactly. You can be like, nope, this is what you saw. So it dried up at almost the exact same time. OK, all right. That makes a lot of sense. But before that, there was like people

have been seeing weird stuff in the sky and being like UFO for a while. But in our Project Blue Book episode, we found like the moment it really kicked off. And that was June 24th, 1947. And we chalked it up to a guy named Kenneth Arnold who was a, I think an amateur pilot or like a hobbyist who saw what came to be considered the first flying saucer.

Yeah, he, and the alarming thing about this was he clocked the speed at about 1600 miles an hour, Alarming thing about this was he clocked the speed at about 1600 miles an hour Which is at the time, you know easily Three times faster than anything else could fly. Yeah, and this is where the term saucer came from He said they flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water Mm-hmm. And so that's kind of where that term came from and this is you know, this is just after World War two And it's not like any, no one had ever claimed to have witnessed anything before this,

but basically pre this date, it was 100%, well, maybe not 100%, who knows. But most people were saying like, oh, that's just, you know, some enemy technology or something that we don't know about. Yeah, so Kenneth Arnold kicked off what you would characterize as like the modern UFO movement, I guess, right? Yeah, as in there's an alien driving, not a Russian. Yes, yeah, good point.

And also the thing that really bolstered it, within days of that, within two weeks, the Roswell crash happened, which a lot of people say that's the advent of the idea that aliens are actually visiting us and that the government is covering it up, right? So those two things, it was a one-two punch in 1947, in the summer of 1947, that really kind of just debuted aliens to the world. And one of the things that we'll see with abduction narratives or stories or claims, they usually have a very dark, bad thread to them.

They're not a positive experience. And aliens have kind of gotten in large part like that kind of view by the public. If there are aliens out there, it's not entirely clear that they are benevolent or kind. But that's not how it was at the outset, was it? Yeah, we can chalk that up to a dude named George Adamski, I guess. Adamski. Yeah. He was a, he immigrated from Poland and he founded a group called the Royal Order of

Tibet in Southern California in the 30s. He was a teacher of philosophy. He was, you know, he was he was kind of out there a little bit. And in 1952, he claimed that he met an alien named Orthon, which is, I mean, it's got to be the inspiration from Orson from Mork from Mork, right? Probably because these were really popular books at the time. Yeah, I mean, it just sounds like you're saying Mork calling Orthon with a lisp, basically. Yeah, exactly.

Or how I say it now with my tooth. It's like Tyson calling Orthon. But his narrative was a bit different. He was like, hey, this alien Orthon was a beautiful man. He had a high forehead. He had hair, which is, alien, Orthon, was a beautiful man. He had a high forehead. He had hair, which is, as you'll see, pretty unusual from the grays that follow. And a uniform on, a brown uniform, and, you know, was telepathic, could, like, speak to him basically through his brain and brought a message of peace saying, hey, I'm from Venus,

and you guys should stop with the nuclear weapons. Right. Um, so this was like how people kind of viewed aliens visiting us at the time. Like, this guy was writing these books like they were nonfiction and people were eating them up. Yeah.

Um, so there was this idea that, okay, aliens are kind of cool, they're more advanced than us and they have our best interests in mind. And then that took a serious, like, left turn. Just a few years later, in the late 50s, when a farmer in Brazil named Antonio Vies Boas claimed that he had been taken aboard a spaceship. And Adamski later claimed that he had been on a spaceship, too, but this was pretty new stuff.

That he had basically been abducted and forced to have sex with what he admitted was an attractive alien, but was a bit turned off by the fact that she barked during sex. And then returned to his farm. And this was a brand new, this was new ground essentially that Boaz had started to trod. Yeah, for sure.

I mean, this is, I couldn't find an earlier one that mentioned any kind of sexual assault going on. Right. Was this the first one? From what I could tell, yes. All right. So he was, of course, went to a doctor. They examined him.

They said he's probably making this whole thing up. But there was a group, a UFO, an early UFOology group that published this experience anyway. And in 1965, it ran in an international journal called Flying Saucer Review, which I got to get a copy of one of those and All of a sudden, you know people all over the world are hearing this story And this sort of you know was happening and you know, it was international but it wasn't it didn't hit the American

Public quite like this story of Betty and Barney Hill, which really, really kicked things off here in the States. Yeah, because his thing came out in the journal in 1965, and the Hills had an experience in 1961. They are widely seen as the first credible abductees. If you believe in that kind of stuff, you probably are focused on Betty and Barney Hill. They were an interracial couple in 1961 in New Hampshire. Betty was a social worker and Barney was a postal officer. And they had taken a delayed honeymoon to Montreal and were on their way back

when they noticed that they were basically being chased by a light in the sky. And when they grabbed their binoculars and stopped and got out of the car, they could actually see that it was essentially a flying saucer, and that aliens were looking at them through the windows. And the next thing they know, it's 5 a.m., they're pulling into their house about three hours later than they had expected to, and Barney's shoes were scuffed and Betty's dress was torn, and they didn't know what had happened,

but they were genuinely bothered by the experience. Yeah. And we'll dive in a little bit more with them, but the reason that you mentioned that they're an interracial couple is because they were doing a lot of work for civil rights and stuff like that. So they, all that to say they had no reason to, in fact, every reason not to kind of come forward with this crazy story,

given their positions of doing like this, great civil rights work is, it would just, all of a sudden people would call them kooks and probably cast doubt on the genuine good work they were doing. So they had no reason to make something like this up. And everything to lose too. Yeah, everything to lose.

So they're trying to figure out and make sense of what had happened to them. Because again, as you'll see with all these stories, whether or not this happened or not, almost doesn't matter in some cases because the trauma that's visited upon them afterward is very much real Just like any kind of potential false memory. So Betty starts researching goes to the library and starts Looking at books from the NICAP which we've talked about before. Yeah, not yet Yeah, not kept the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomenon. And that's, you know, that was some retired military officers and, you know, UFO enthusiasts

who had gotten together this, you know, pretty early research group. And afterward, they were, you know, they were suffering from PTSD, especially the husband. He was, he had pretty severe anxiety from this. Yeah, he did. Betty had trouble sleeping, Barney had a bunch of anxiety. They were affected by this experience and they had this missing time that they knew they couldn't account for and they wanted to know what happened. So they were earnestly trying to look for somebody to help explain what had happened

to them and why their lives were affected. First they went to the military and followed official channels because this is when Project Blue Book was an actual thing and like you were encouraged to report any UFO sighting to the military because they were investigating it. And the military was like, you know, this is not an important story.

Sorry guys, we can't help you. So they turned to their church and apparently their church was like, this is way out of our league. Yeah. Maybe you saw God and they're like, no, it wasn't God. They're like, yes, we can't help you. So they turned to their church, and apparently their church was like, this is way out of our league. Yeah. Maybe you saw God, and they're like, no, it wasn't God. They're like, yes, sorry, we can't help you either. So they turned to psychiatry, and a psychiatrist named Benjamin Simon agreed to help them.

And this was a time where there was a good chance you were going to be hypnotized if you were on a psychiatrist's couch. This is the early to mid 1960s. And so they were hypnotized over a series of sessions. And all of a sudden, these memories have been repressed that covered that chunk of time that they couldn't account for, started to come forward. That's right, which was abduction.

Yeah. Little great creatures, you know, this is sort of the beginning of the stereotypical gray as we know them. Gray, little skinny bodies, the big heads, the big oval eyes. They brought them onboard the spaceship and did the, you know, the usual kind of stuff, which is, let me probe you, let me sample you.

Apparently they put a needle into Betty's stomach, which is what they assume was like a pregnancy test. They were very entranced by Barney's dentures. And then they wiped their memories out, I guess, men in black style. And that's where the lost time comes from. And these were like, these were real deal, super emotional hypnosis sessions with a very qualified psychiatrist.

But even after all that, the psychiatrist, Simon, was like, I don't know, I think they have a shared delusion going on. Exactly. Yeah. So he was like, you guys weren't abducted, but you both believe you were abducted and it's having an effect on you. He actually drilled down a little further and suggested that it was actually latent racial tensions that existed in their marriage that they weren't equipped to deal with and were purposely kind of subverting into these weird, you know, alien fantasies,

but that really that's what it was. And they were like, no, dude, you're wrong. We were abducted. All of these memories are real. And he's like, have you heard of false memories? And the Hills were like, no, we haven't. They just kept moving on. So the psychiatry couldn't help them either. And as they went further and further along trying to get answers, they kind of were pushed

further and further out of the mainstream and toward the fringes where they were welcomed with open arms. Oh, of course. The story got published in 1965. A guy named John Lutriel from the Boston Traveler reported on this. UPI picks it up. And then a guy named John G. Fuller made it into a book in 1966 called The Interrupted Journey, colon, Two Lost Hours Aboard a Flying

Saucer, which eventually became a TV movie in 1975 called The UFO Incident, which you can watch on YouTube if you want to see a relatively young and, you know, pretty in great shape, James Earl Jones. Yeah, it's a good movie. Did you watch it? I kind of scrubbed through it looking for the good stuff. I didn't watch it this time. I watched it when I was younger for sure. Yeah, like most of the movie,

like 85% of it looks like it takes place in the psychiatrist's office. For sure. And I didn't see just scrubbing through any good alien stuff till kind of toward the end. I guess they were just wanted to wait to for the big reveal or whatever. But Estelle Parsons plays the wife

and Barnard Hughes from Doc Hollywood. He was the old doctor in Doc Hollywood played Simon. And it was a big deal movie. And it was like, you know, it's a TV movie at a time when TV movies were big. If you're around these days and you're not familiar with how things were back then, a big TV movie like this could be sort of a national phenomenon. Yeah, because, I mean, you had a very limited amount of choices of what to watch on any

given night. So if there was a big TV movie, they promoted the heck out of it. And all the, the whole country could be talking about it for the next couple of weeks, you'd be reading about it in the newspaper. It would be a big deal, right? So yeah, and this was a big deal too. You mentioned that there wasn't much alien stuff in there. And apparently Betty Hill was very disappointed that James Earl Jones and

the producers had kind of taken this story that to her was a legitimate alien abduction story and used it to explore the themes of like interracial marriage, civil rights, being black in a largely white state. Barney's general experience of being a black man in the 60s. And she was like, yeah, that probably has something to do with it. But really, we need more aliens, right? It had a huge... I mean, it's hard to argue with it, but really we need more aliens, right? It had a huge...

Sorry to argue with that. Exactly. And it had a huge effect too because it kicked off. So everything we know about alien abductions, the whole narrative, the whole thread, all the claims that followed are based largely on Betty and Barney Hill's experience. Yeah, and it should come as no surprise that after that movie airs, a lot more of these stories start to pop up. Very famous one, just a couple of weeks later, after the movie aired in 1975 is when the

logger Travis Walton in Arizona was, you know, beamed up into that spaceship, became a movie, Fire in the Sky. In 1993, he was gone for about a week, came back, said that he was examined by what we would now call the Grays, little short baldies. And it just, you know, things really start to ramp up, almost in lockstep with stories ramping up, if that makes sense. They were kind of feeding each other. Yeah, by the way, Travis Walton was roundly exposed

as a hoaxster, and so was everybody in his group, and they saw it attributed to his boss, the head of this logging company, wanting to get out of an un-lucrative contract with the federal government. So they concocted this story. That's a good way to do that. Yeah, that is so 70s, you know?

That that's how you would get out of a contract. Yeah, pretty good movie. Not a bad movie, though. Fire in the Sky was pretty good. I never saw it. Yeah, it's not bad. D.B. Sweeney? Yeah, was he on Saturday Night Live?

Why do I think that? You're thinking there was another Sweeney. Julius Sweeney, I know, but I thought D.B. Sweeney was too. Maybe I'm conflating Julius Sweeney and G.E. Smith in Saturday Night Live band and coming up with D.B. Sweeney. Yeah, maybe so. G.E. Smith was great.

Yeah, I saw G.E. Smith and the Saturday Night Live band backing up Hall and Oates at the first ever concert I ever saw. Now, my friend, I knew you went and saw Hall and Oates. I did not know that G.E. Smith was in the SNL band was the band. Yes. I think it was the sax player who wore the floor length mink coats, like the whole shebang. It was like they took the Saturday Night Live band and and that's who was touring with Holland Oates. And Oates was like, can you tone it down?

Get rid of that coat. It's competing with my hair and mustache. All right, I think we should probably take a break, yay? Yay. All right, and we'll be right back and talk about more grays right after this. I heard podcast update this week on your free IR radio app. Rachel goes rogue for the first time. She's ready to tell you the real story on her own terms.

What's true? What's false and the secrets she's been waiting to reveal. Two Jersey Jays. From menopause to making the most of your 40s and 50s, follow these fabulous women as they navigate family, friendships, and even frenemies. The Eds. There's so much more to the Eds than being married to Real Housewives. These two gentlemen are loved and well-mannered, quite the opposite of their trash-talking

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marketers, but actual operators. And the icing on the cake is Neil and myself were also operators as well. So we share learnings from the trenches. We share secrets that we otherwise wouldn't be sharing with other people. And we also share other advantages that will help you get ahead of your competition. So all you have to do is listen to marketing school every weekday on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so that was in the 60s and 70s, but basically from the 50s on through the

70s, there were all kinds of encounters and there were a lot of different kinds of aliens that people were reporting ranging from a headless winged bat kind of thing in England to a pointy-eared glowing-eyed creature in North Carolina. And this is when UFO research groups who are, who very much want people to believe that UFOs and aliens are real, are, I get the feeling behind the scenes are like, guys, we got to consolidate around a look here, because all these weird aliens that people are reporting are not doing ourselves any favors basically. So can we settle on the grays? And they did. Yeah, and that somehow or another,

that is exactly how it happened. And it ended up in mainstream pop culture being adopted like that, where, like, as the grays became more and more widespread, it was like a positive feedback where more people portrayed aliens as the grays because that's what aliens looked like. And it just kept spreading from there until the general streamlined understanding

of what aliens looked like was the grays over time. And I just want to point out that probably the greatest X-Files episode of all time, Jose Chung's From Outer Space, turns this process on its head, where there are two gray aliens that turn out to be human actors in costumes, who themselves have an actual legitimate alien encounter with an alien that looks like one of the just bizarre kind from the 50s. It's like has fur. It's a cyclops with a horn.

And it has like chicken legs. And that's like the actual alien. And I just think that's just as sharp as can be, that they took that thread and just twisted it around. I don't remember that episode. I was not an X-Files watcher at the time when it aired. I got into it in the, although when did it stop, you know?

Like the early 2000s? Okay, well, it was syndicated while it was still going then, I guess, because I started watching reruns and syndication in like 97. And I don't even know if I kind of started at the beginning and watched it all the way through, but when I was living in New Jersey, I ended up watching a lot of X-Files. So... And enjoyed it quite a bit. This is a standalone episode.

You don't have to know anything that's going on to enjoy it. Yeah, yeah. If you do know what's going on, it's even more enjoyable. But Jose Chung is this science fiction author who has a book or something called From Outer Space. And he's played by Charles Nelson Riley. There's stories of the men in black showing up and the men in black are played by Alex Trebek

and Jesse the Body Ventura as themselves, but they're men in black. Yeah, it's an amazing episode. It's so great. So I definitely don't remember that one. You need to go see it. It's really worth it. It's worth your 44 minutes of your time.

Were you into X-Files from the beginning, like live run or whatever? It's really worth it. It's worth your 44 minutes of your time. Were you into X-Files from the beginning, like live run or whatever? Pretty much. Yeah, when I watch it now though, I used to, originally I was like, God, get this stupid monster stuff out of this, get back to the alien conspiracy, right? Now as a grown up, I'm like,

that alien conspiracy thing is so played out. I really enjoy the monster of the Week episode way more. Yeah. I think the mix of the two was kind of what made it so great. Yeah, it was very smart. All right. So the other thing we should mention about the grays is that when Betty, at one point, they had her recreate a star map that the aliens who had captured her had shown her.

And when she described what she had seen, a lot of people said it sounds a lot like Zeta Reticuli, which is a star system about 39 light years from Earth. And so you might hear them called grays, but if you ever hear anyone in the biz, I guess, refer to the aliens as Zeta Reticulans, that comes from that. Yeah, and like we said, a lot of the, just the basics of alien abduction stories were

founded by the hills, unaccounted for missing time, being abducted, being probed. Yeah, sore butthole. Yeah, exactly. All that stuff originally with the hills, but it formed the basis or foundation that other people that come just kind of slowly built on. And there was one person who contributed quite a bit, an artist from New York named Bud Hopkins, who said that he had a close encounter, I guess it would be the second kind,

where they just saw like a flying saucer over Cape Cod. But it was enough of an experience that he kind of became, I don't know if obsessed is the right word, but deeply interested in the idea of UFOs and aliens. So he started kind of researching the whole thing and ended up writing a book in 1981 called, I got to take a deep breath, Missing Time, colon, Documented Stories of People Kidnapped by UFOs and then returned with their memories erased. Yeah, he didn't want to leave anything to chance as far as people misunderstanding

what his book was about. Yeah, colon, does that make sense? Right. Colin, I'm talking about aliens, baby. So that was a pretty big book and it established that pattern that we've been talking about of these abduction stories where you see the UFO and Sometimes you don't remember anything and you just wake up in bed or whatever not accounting for the time There was a young woman in the book. It was the first time that anyone had claimed to have been abducted twice young woman in the book. It was the first time that anyone had claimed to have been

abducted twice. A young woman named Virginia Horton when she was six, well I guess she was a little girl then, and then at 16 years old. And this also follows a pattern in that in the second one she followed a deer into the woods and then woke up at home with a bloody nose and following an animal into the woods is a story up at home with a bloody nose and following an animal into the woods is a story that pops up kind of quite a bit when you're talking about alien abduction. Yes, exactly. So one of the other things that Bud Hopkins contributed was the idea that people were being repeatedly abducted, some

people were, and that he's like probably what's going on is they're being impregnated and then, you know, they give birth and then this hybrid alien human baby is born, and that's really what's going on here. And then they take that baby, the aliens. Yeah. But I think he also suggested that this was for the benefit of the human race, that they were actually benevolent as brutal or, I guess, uncomfortable as their tactics may have seemed. Yeah, for sure. So things are really cooking at this point.

Finally, we get to a very, very popular book. There's a guy named Whitley Stryber, who was a writer already and this really helped the fact that he was already a writer and had the backing of publishers get this book out there. But he was a horror and science fiction writer and in 87 published the book Communion which had, if you look up the cover of Communion, the illustration that was done by Ted Jacobs along with Stryber because he was like, this is what I saw, you gotta draw this.

That is stereotypical alien head, as you could imagine on the cover of this very popular book. Yeah, like if the grays had kind of been percolating throughout pop culture, this is like where all that, all those different threads got pulled into one alien image, and then from that moment on, that's essentially what the grays looked like,

that cover illustration. Because it was just such a widely read book. And Stryber says, and always has said, from what I can tell, he's never broken character. If this was a hoax, he's never ever even intimated that it was. He said that until he started realizing that he had been abducted, um, he had never really

been much into aliens, had never done much research, so, um, he was giving the impression that all of his, his accounts were, were fresh. He went into them fresh, like George Costanza, right? He didn't know what he was talking about when he, when he was writing about this. This was a legitimate memory And as he remembered more and more and more He realized that this had been going on since childhood and the entire chunks of his life were Fabricated memories that had been implanted by the aliens that abducted him to cover up the memories of his actual abductions

and what they were doing to him on their ships. And so, in addition to that cover alien, the image of the grays, one of the big things that Whitley Stryber contributed to the whole, I guess, phenomenon is the idea of screen memories that no longer was it just missing time. You might not just missing time.

You might not be missing time. You might not even remember having been abducted, but you just knew you'd been abducted. And if you thought about it enough or if you went and tried to get to the bottom of your repressed memories, those screen memories would fall away and the true memories of your abduction would bubble up to the surface. Yeah. And it was a very, very big book. It became a movie in 1989, a Christopher Walken movie. I'm pretty sure I saw it back then.

I don't know if I saw it in the theater or not. It feels like a VHS movie to me. Yeah, for sure. But Walken played him. If you look up the trailer on YouTube, it's a terrifying trailer. It's really unsettling to watch it. Okay.

With the music and everything. They portrayed it as like a horror movie basically. But he is one that also, Stryber that is, who never also claimed like officially that they were space aliens. Right. He was just like, hey, this happened to me. I'm not saying they're space aliens necessarily. He actually said they could come from another dimension

or maybe it could be something else. I know in one of our UFO episodes, I talked about the fact that there's some people who think that the grays are just humans from the future and that that's what we eventually evolved to look like because our brains get bigger and bigger, so our heads bigger and the actual outer ear is superfluous to the real hearing mechanism so that's why they don't appear to have

ears or noses, they just have ear holes and nose holes and as we go on the eyes are supposedly getting bigger as we evolve. So that's, you know, that's one theory. Right. Or another one is that they're from another dimension, not necessarily from space. One of the other things that Stryber contributed was the idea that you would be probed anally or sexually in some way, shape or form.

Remember, Boas, the Brazilian farmer, was the one who contributed being sexually assaulted aboard a spaceship, a UFO. By a hot parking alien woman. Exactly. Yeah. But apparently most scholars trace the anal probe trope to Whitley's driver.

He said that there was a large object with a network of wires on the end that was inserted into his rectum. And what's interesting is that bears a strange resemblance to what Barney Hill claimed, too. He said that he had been anally probed and that there was a needle with a network of wires or something along that line.

He didn't use that exact phrase. But that it had been left out of the book by John G. Fuller, that detail had. It was only, it only showed up in a 1965 NYCAP report. So it wasn't well known at the time, although it's entirely possible that if Whitley Strieber was a hoaxer, you can imagine as a writer,

he would have done enough research to go back and read a 1965 report about the quintessential abduction experience. Yeah, and as far as the anal probe goes, I've given this a lot of thought over the years. I said like, why? That's always a thing. And the only thing I could come up with is that,

there are only so many holes, only so many areas of entry in your body, you know? And there are reports of, you know, nose probes and bleeding noses and stuff like that. And I think the hidden quality, the hidden nature of the butthole might entice aliens to be like, you know, they see the nose, they see the ears, they see all the obvious ones, and then there's like, ooh, there's a hidden one. Like what treasure awaits us? Yeah, that's universal, not just among humans, but around the universe. Like what is in that

butthole? Yeah. That's a great theory, man. Good stuff. I like that. So yeah, that's a, that's just kind of like a little, like a lot of people chalk that up to Whitley Stryber, which may or may not be correct, but that is interesting. Um, that was 1989 that the movie community came out. What'd you say, 1987 for the book?

That had a huge effect. The X-Files, like we said, came along and took all this stuff. Like, if you watched the X-Files back then, or now or whenever, all of this is just so familiar. Like, Chris Carter apparently read up on the abduction phenomenon and just turned it into different plot lines, right?

So. Yeah. Pure gold. Yeah. And so that just spread it out into the pop culture even further. And then there was a guy named John Mack, who was the head of Harvard's psychiatry department, who was far and away the most credentialed person to come out and say, I'm pretty sure these people are telling

the truth in some way, shape or form. Yeah. And everyone was like, you sure you want to come out with this? Yeah. And he did, very bravely. He was one of those people who railed against science just kind of having its own dogma and keeping its head in the sand about things it couldn't explain. He didn't like that very much. So that kind of fit with his vibe from what I can tell.

But he kind of lent a little bit of legitimacy, especially if you were on the fringes. The fact that he was saying this stuff just gave you so much support right then. Yeah. He had a book in 94, about 13 different abduction cases called Abduction, Colon, Human Encounters with Alien, parentheses, BTW, I teach at Harvard. Right, did I mention?

Yeah. So I say we take another break and come back and talk about what scholars who don't buy the fact that these are actual alien abductions make of all this. Yeah, it gets pretty interesting after this I think. I Heart Podcast update this week on your free I Heart Radio app. Rachel goes rogue. For the first time, she's ready to tell you the real story on her own terms. What's true, what's false, and the secrets she's been waiting to reveal.

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Listen to Fodor's Guide to Espionage on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck. There's a couple of nuts and bolts things you should know about UFO subculture. And it's so extensive and it's been around for so long and the people who are into it are so into it that just by glossing over it, we're probably gonna get stuff wrong or we're just gonna walk past some stuff. We're not experts.

We've never claimed to be experts and we're not experts of UFO subculture. So just want to caveat that. Probably should have said that at the outset of this episode. But in UFO subculture, from the research I've seen, you can kind of divide people into two groups. One are contactees, people who have met aliens, And the other is abductees. And those are people who have been taken by aliens. And if you'll remember back to our Project Blue Book episode, there was an astronomer named J.

Allen Heineck, who was a debunker of UFOs until he just became a true believer. He's the guy who came up with the close encounters classifications. Yeah. He left off with close encounters of the third kind, contact. What abductees brought to that was close encounters of the fourth kind where you were taken against your will into a spaceship. And among those two different groups, there's two very different views of aliens between contactees and abductees.

Yeah, for sure. If you're a contactee, you're much more likely to relate a positive experience, basically. I think a lot of the contactees, I've read that they feel like they're, like a feeling of being chosen, like in a good way. Abductees, it's kind of the other way around. There's all kinds of stories of probing,

non-consensual encounters, medical procedures going on, It's kind of the other way around. There's all kinds of stories of probing non-consensual encounters medical procedures going on You know all the stuff that you hear about shoving things in different holes of your body are not positive experiences for most abductees And it's really interesting. I think that That the contactees can feel like chosen or touched, whereas the abductees feel violated. It is, it's super interesting. There's also kind of a subgroup of abductees.

Those are the people who have no memory of being abducted, but they're sure that they were abducted. They probably have unaccounted time in their life that they can look back on and think like, what happened there? They just get the sense that they can look back on and think like what happened there. They just get the sense that they're abducted too, right? So. Yeah, which is interesting.

It is super interesting. The thing is, this is really, really important. I saw this in a lot of different places with people who research UFO abductees. They say that there are definitely people who are hoaxsters. Yeah. There are definitely people who have like serious mental illness and are actually delusional, but that by and large on the whole,

UFO abductees are sane, sincere, genuine people who truly believe that they were abducted by aliens and whose lives have been, in a lot of cases, wrecked by it because they display the symptoms of trauma. They have post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms from being abducted. And so if you're like, well, you know, I don't really buy any of this as being alien in nature,

like how would you explain it? And so sociology and psychology have said about trying to explain it and neither one's really kind of rung the bell fully yet. Yeah, for sure. There is plenty of research that's been done, even though they haven't, you know, like you said, they haven't come to like a great conclusion about it.

But abductees, their memories, the idea is like if you're an abductee or you claim to be an abductee, then you're probably more prone to a false memory. There are some different tests they can do. One is called the Dease-Rodiger-McDermott task, DRM. That's where they give you a bunch of words that are sort of linked together, but there's a one word, they call it a lure word that's missing. So Livia put together an example of snooze, blanket, snore, dream, pillow, bed.

They don't use the word sleep in there, very key, but obviously that's the one lure word that's missing. And the people that are asked to sort of recount this, and if they insert the missing word that was never mentioned, like if they say sleep, then they're saying, all right, well, you're more susceptible to a false memory, because we never said sleep, so they are. Yeah, that's exactly how they present it too. At the end of the study. It's very humiliating. But yeah, that's kind of one of the general premises that people who believe that they

were abducted by UFOs and whose lives are really affected by it negatively, just are more susceptible to generating false memories. And some research backs that up. There have been studies that show that they, they, they do report more critical, lure words than other people who don't believe they were abducted. Other studies say we tried the same thing and

found no difference whatsoever between the two. But we did find differences in other psychological traits. Like disassociativity, like having, um, like reality seems unreal to you. Absorption, which is a predisposition to get deeply immersed in sensory or mystical experiences. The, the, the, likelier to have paranormal beliefs, likelier to believe that they have psychic abilities, fantasy proneness, difficulty differentiating between fantasy and reality,

and a tendency to hallucinate. And that, so these people are like, no, it's not proneness to developing false memories, it's all these other traits that are basically, they're luring these people into this kind of fantasy world that they're not distinguishing from reality, and that that essentially has become part of their life to them.

They've adopted that as part of their life. Those seem to be the two dominant rival psychological explanations for this. Yeah. There's another sort of, not sort of, it sounds incredibly cruel test that was done, or a study rather, when they got kids together either seven or eight year olds or 11 and 12 year olds and they said you were abducted by an alien when you were four years old In fact, here's your mom and she's gonna Reinforce this by telling you this happened and here's a fake newspaper Well, they don't say fake, but here's a newspaper report that

talks about these abductions being pretty common. It's totally made up of course. And then if these children go on to describe a lot more detail about the memory of being abducted when they were four years old, then they're classified as having false memories. And I just, I can't believe that they were allowed to get away with doing this. Yeah, from what this one, I think a British Psychological Association or Society article found they could find two studies that tried to implant false abduction memories into kids.

One was from 1984, and they actually ascribed abductions to basically suppressed or repressed memories of being born. And then this one from 2009 with Otgar and friends, right? And like, yeah, it's deeply unethical. And they debriefed the kids. They said, no, this is all just a study or whatever, so don't walk around thinking like this actually

really happened to you, but who knows if that really worked. But it raised a really important point, and it really, as unethical as it was, showed how easy it is for false memories to be implanted, especially if you are being told that by someone in a position of authority, like your psychologist or therapist or psychiatrist, right? And there's a really big rift in the field of psychology and psychiatry between whether traumatic memories can be repressed. And if so, that means they can probably be recovered through good therapy. Or if you don't actually repress traumatic

experiences and that if you do try to recover memories, what you remember is going to be false memories that are accidentally implanted. So that whole premise that you have missing time and that if you go see a therapist who's sympathetic and understands what you're going through, they will help you recover those memories, it strongly suggests that all those are false memories,

even though, again, they're causing real, legitimate pain in these people's lives. Yeah, for sure. And I know we talked about this in maybe Project Bluebeak book, but some others. As far as what else this could be, why you're having these false memories and sleep paralysis always seems to come up.

We did an episode on this. About 15% of the population experiences it. It's when you, you know, wake up in the middle of night, you can't move, you might hear some buzzing sounds, you might see flashing lights, you almost always, it seems like, see pretty frightening shadowy figures in your room, maybe hovering above you or at the foot of your bed So sleep paralysis could explain some of this or theoretically it could and then another one which is interesting as far as the hypothesis goes is magnetic disturbances by plate tectonics that are causing

hallucinations and This is what's really interesting to me distorted recollections of medical procedures while you're under anesthesia like as you're going out I think anyone who's ever done the Twilight Sleep thing for some you know or major you know surgery when you're fully under it that six or seven seconds where you're laying there with a bright light above you and people hovering over you it gets weirder and weirder and people think that this could be associated with that because a lot of the people who had reported abductions had undergone surgery recently. Yeah

that's pretty pretty interesting as far as coincidences go. That's anesthesia awareness. And I think we did a whole episode on it. The idea that you can have memories if you're not under quite enough. And that if it's a medical procedure, yeah, you could remember that as aliens, you know, probing you or whatever. Sure. Yeah. That's what it feels like.

Yeah, I would guess so, for sure. I just remember being like, man, I'm so wasted, and reminding myself like, oh yeah, I'm allowed to be, these people got me wasted. Right. Sociology, for their part, has done some study too, and just kind of quickly, what they've come up with is that if you are very religious, you're probably less likely to believe in aliens and even less likely to believe you're abducted by aliens. But if you are untrusting of the government,

you're far likelier to believe that you're abducted by aliens. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And also the fact that, who is it? Joseph O. Baker is a sociologist who studies this stuff a lot. And he's like, post-Watergate, you saw a lot of this stuff happening, and that's, you know, when a lot of people had big distrust of the government. So it's sort of, there's a correlation there at least. For sure. And then I say we wrap it up on that study by Bud Hopkins, the artist who got real deep into abduction lore. Yeah, let's do it. Okay, so in the 90s, Bud Hopkins worked with some academics

and came up with like a legitimate random survey that sought to see how many of the population, like what percentage of the population believes they were abducted. And they came up with like, like five, like a questionnaire that got to the bottom of whether somebody felt like they had experienced five different aspects of abduction, right?

Waking up paralyzed with a sense of strange presence in the room, losing an hour or more of time that lost unaccounted for time, feeling of flying, which could also correlate with witchcraft, seeing strange lights in a room, and then finding odd scars on your body, and being like, I have no idea where the scar came from. Yeah, so they did that.

This is in the early 1990s. They did some, they, you know, controlled the data, or did some controlling for the data, and they found that 2% of the sample had four of those five related experiences happen to them, or did some controlling for the data, and they found that 2% of the sample had four of those five related experiences happen to them, which is about 3.7 million Americans. That number, I think, UFOologists and people

who study this stuff say, yeah, you know, that number's really, really high. It's probably more like thousands, but 3.7 million people experience at least four of those five things. Yeah, a lot of people, so a lot of people use that in, in like articles and stuff on that, like 3.7 million is a big number. But I just want to point out they had a really ingenious way of separating out the fibbers from the outset. One of the questions was, you know, does the word trondant mean, have special meaning for you? And about 1% of respondents said, yep, that really does. You know what I'm talking about.

And trondant is a made up word that they use to catch fibbers. And I think trondant is like a really great band name too, especially because of the background it has. Yeah, space rock. Good one. You got anything else? Nah.

Yeah, I mean the whole thing's still ongoing. There's plenty of people out there who believe they were abducted and psychology's still struggling to get to the bottom of it fully. So hopefully it will so it can help all those people whose lives are affected by it negatively. Yeah, and at the very least, we've gotten some fun movie and TV's out of it.

For sure. If you want to know more about alien abductions, there's a lot to read out there and you can do that. And in the meantime, we're just going to go ahead and have listener mail. Hey guys, been listening since 2013. Since then, you've been with me through college graduation, brain surgery, a wedding, COVID at my teaching career, IVF and our new baby.

Wowee. Since Amber was born last July, I've been catching up on missed episodes. In August, 2023, I think you had a couple of ups about language acquisition. This is so in my wheelhouse because I'm a middle high school Spanish teacher. And it made me think of this anecdote relating to language acquisition. This is so in my wheelhouse because I'm a middle high school Spanish teacher and it made me think of this anecdote relating to language acquisition. I frequently pepper Spanish into my daily vocabulary and also hate squirrels. This is right up your alley,

Josh. I frequently refer to them in Spanish. One day last summer I asked my husband, who is a gringo, what he thought the Spanish word for squirrel was, he hesitated and then guessed, bendejo? I'll let you look up what that word actually means, but it's definitely not squirrel. After listening to the parasocial relationship episode, I got too embarrassed to tell you this anecdote right away after the language episodes, but I decided to send it anyway now, currently listening to the 2023 Halloween special, and hope to be caught up by June. And that is from Becky Hill.

Thanks a lot, Becky. And congratulations to you and your husband on the birth of Amber. And from what I know about Bendejo, like that's a pretty accurate term. For Squirrel. Yeah. Okay. If you want to be like Becky and get in touch with us and just share some great stuff about your life, we love to hear that.

You can send it off in an email to stuffpodcastsatihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. I'm a cognitive scientist and I've written 10 books and hundreds of articles on topics such as intelligence, introversion, and education. The Psychology Podcast is a place where we investigate the different ways in which we can unlock human potential and

where I get to interview some of the most extraordinary and fascinating people and we have real conversations about what it means to achieve success and what it means to be human. Listen to the Psychology Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. as they navigate family, friendships, and even frenemies. The Eds, there's so much more to The Eds than being married to real housewives. These two gentlemen are loved and well-mannered, quite the opposite of their trash-talking wives. Hear these podcasts and more on your free iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is Edgy Martinez. Check out my podcast, Edgy Martinez IRL, where I talk to Super Bowl halftime performer and the newly married Usher about relationships. Trust is the main, you know, component to happiness and success in a relationship. Being able to actually hear each other and speak up. I think most of the time you we all just want to be heard. Listen to Angie Martinez IRL on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts and wherever you get your podcasts.