![]() This list does not even mention such marginalia of normal science as prebirth hypnotic age regression, multiple personalities, and so forth. Prone to believe in the Bermuda Triangle, flying saucers, spoon-bending by mental power, the Abominable Snowman, and return to life after the out-of-body experience of death. As psychologist Brendan Maher puts it, normal people are: New Age views, though, are perfectly normal, which is to say, they are widespread in the healthy population. 9 What has been found though is that abductees often entertain New Age beliefs (in, for example, astral projection, foretelling the future, and so on), which perhaps make them more prone to explaining their nighttime experience by appeal to alien abduction. However, there is ‘no convincing evidence for higher rates of serious psychopathology amongst abductees compared to the general population. It might be thought that for those that do, something is pathologically amiss. Now, of course, not everyone who has an experience of this kind ends up believing they were abducted by aliens. He could see several alien beings standing around his bed. He felt his energy draining away from him. He was entirely paralysed, and felt electricity shooting throughout his body. Consider one:Ī male abductee awoke in the middle of the night seized with panic. 7 Several reports from abductees chime well with this explanation. 6 Abductees report a variety of these experiences the hallucinations may be visual, including ‘lights, animals, strange figures, and demons’, or auditory including ‘heavy footsteps, humming or buzzing noises’. ![]() 75% of subjects will hallucinate whilst experiencing ASP. In ASP, the sleeper wakes up before the paralysis has disappeared and is aware that they are unable to move. During Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, the sleeper is immobilized. So why do people believe that they have been abducted by aliens when, presumably, they haven’t? Psychologists looking to answer this question have appealed to awareness during sleep paralysis (ASP) and accompanying hallucinations. 5 If aliens are visiting and abducting (at least) thousands of us, the idea that the United States government might be hiding aliens in a secret military base begins to look less outlandish, and more, perhaps, utterly plausible. ![]() The prevalence of these beliefs is unknown, but estimates vary from ‘at least several thousand worldwide’, 4 to 3.7 million in American alone. ![]() Some abductees claim to have formed sexual relationships and produced hybrid offspring with their abductors, as well as having received important information about the fate of the Earth. For some, this contact is a matter of aliens visiting their bedroom at night, but for others it can mean being abducted, taken aboard a spaceship, and once there, being subjected to medical experimentation including the removal of eggs or sperm. ![]() Why might some people believe that there are aliens being hidden by the United States government? Sure, via the usual routes of one’s social group and internet activity, but also because many people claim to have been in contact with aliens. There are all sorts of explanations we can give for the prevalence of conspiratorial beliefs, including the make-up of our social groups, and the wide access to an internet packed full of conspiratorial claims (researchers ran a Google search for ‘vaccination’ and ‘immunization’ which turned up results 43% of which were anti-vaccination websites 3). The reason for this? ‘To see them aliens’, presumed hidden by the United States government. At the time of writing, 1.6 million Facebook users have marked themselves as attending a storming of Area 51, the Air Base in Nevada, United States. Strange beliefs are rife among humans, from the recent rise of the anti-vaccination movement, 1 to the prominence of the Flat Earth movement, 2 many of us have very strange beliefs. ![]()
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