“In the spirit of three stars / The alien thing that took its form.”
That is Sufjan Stevens opening his luscious indie-folk album Illinois with a song about a UFO sighting. Since its 2005 release, UFO culture has only ballooned, thanks in large part to leaked Pentagon footage from 2017. The sight of physics-defying objects outmaneuvering Navy jets incited conspiratorial chants of victory, as truth-seekers reveled in their newfound evidence for extraterrestrial life. Last summer, U.S. Congress finally acknowledged an official “canon” of alien contact — something theorists have eagerly awaited — but, of course, the hearing only raised an endless query of questions and made believers more ravenous for alien evidence.
For decades, conspiracy theorists have cross-referenced government reports, documented encounters of the third kind and shared their extraterrestrial findings. This has had a visible effect on the public, with more than a third of Americans believing that there’s something strange going on. But that’s all the more reason to be critical. While alien theories provoke our primal fear of the “other” and fuel our wildest imaginations, they also fail to assess their complicated source of evidence: the people who have allegedly experienced UFOs.
It’s easy to paint alien believers with a broad brush. The stigma against them as paranoid attention seekers allows nonbelievers to supersede nearly everything they have to say. And while the stigma may apply to fringe hardcore fanatics, reality is always a shade of gray. Susan Clancy, a cognitive psychology and associate professor at Harvard University, compiled six years of research on a specific group of believers in her book “Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens.” In it, it’s made shockingly clear that her research subjects — self-described alien abductees — are just regular people. Abductees come from all walks of life. They’re doctors, professors and graduate students. They’re mothers and fathers, young and old, rich and poor. If it weren’t for their devout conviction that aliens had snatched them in the dead of night, did God knows what and erased their memory, they would lead pretty normal lives.
As functional people in society, abductees know their stories don’t sound even half-right. They’ve heard from their family and friends that they’re crazy, and they are fully aware that their beliefs run against the social tide. But they can’t help it. This is because these abductions are genuine psychological experiences with measurable impact. A therapist might ascribe these anomalous experiences to mere sleep-induced hallucinations, which would make sense since these late-night abductions are rarely recalled in detail — typical of sleep paralysis hallucinations. But the contours of the experience are so strange and traumatic that alien abductions seemingly provide the only explanation. So, against reason, an abductee’s alien narrative will hold like a fort. All that logic and science prove to abductees is that they aren’t taken seriously, that the public is out to delegitimize and invalidate their experiences and that they are truly alone.
Take Steve, a 47-year-old librarian from Massachusetts. Ever since he was a child, he was atypical. In Clancy’s book, he recalls some scary lights on the road that violently flashed at him from every angle. He was scared, but he kept driving on and on and on. Decades pass and Steve decides to go to a hypnotist. He’s having trouble giving up cigarettes, and he’s hoping that the hypnotist can help him put them down. Well, they didn’t but through hypnosis, some “repressed” memories were unlocked. Steve now knows that he was abducted that night of the lights (nothing will convince him otherwise). Although he can’t access the memories, he has confidence that they are lodged in there. He says, “If I were abducted, it explains a lot. Why I never fit in.” The abduction is not viewed negatively by Steve, and even at their most traumatic, people like Steve are grateful that the abductions happened.
Steve represents a prototype that Clancy repeatedly brings forth: the outsider. Clancy notes that alien abductees tend to view themselves as different, unique and creative, but alienated from society. Even before their encounters, they don’t feel like they belong. In this capacity, abduction beliefs are a coping mechanism, like rationalizing an unfortunate event with “things happen for a reason.” Aliens provide that reason and take the burden off of an individual’s actions and/or society’s sins. The special encounters offer an alternative and compelling explanation for the way things are. Abductees can point to the flashing lights and say, “That’s when I knew I was different; that’s when the aliens chose me.” The narrative becomes an emotional support system that maintains their ego and self-confidence in the face of challenges.
Their attitudes towards their abductions also serve as a social tool. When abductees find other people that share similar alien encounters, they know that they are instantly understood. And if the abductees somehow “remember” the details of the abduction, the effect is even stronger. The existence of other narratives reinforce their own because, as they reason, the stories wouldn’t be so consistent and detailed if they were made up. This ignores the fact that when a person is hypnotized (how abductees rediscover the erased memories), they are highly prone to suggestion, making them recover false memories that build on pre-existing knowledge like film or literary depictions. That’s why abductees end up having such similar stories: They watch the same movies like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” or read the same books like “Communion” and recover similar narratives. Although this belief ostracizes them from larger society, it’s not anything they haven’t experienced amply before. Alien belief is a conspiracy stonewall: intrinsically personal and impenetrable to reason. Pushing back against that would be like tearing down their self-concept and their means of socializing.
If this and religion are beginning to sound alike, that wouldn’t be a bad comparison. Steve himself says that UFOs are a “religion of the scientific” — a richly ironic statement. According to Dr. Diana Pasulka, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, the history of religion is formed by the perceived contact with supernatural beings. The encounters then gain power through an interpretative lens. Alien abductions follow a similar path, acting as “contact events” that hold spiritual significance, signaling that powerful beings do exist and are attempting to reach us. Abductions are transformative events that reveal a desire to find meaning and purpose in life. Therefore, a set of practices must be followed. Therefore, it is the duty of believers — which include and are not limited to abductees — to go to crash sites, to demand transparency and to order the declassification of documents.
For many, UFOs constitute a religion, a belief system and a way of life, even if the practitioners haven’t all experienced UFOs. Being skeptical toward abductees or believers is very much like flagrantly questioning a Christian whose God has answered their prayers. The debate becomes a personal battle since alien belief stems from a desire to fit in and to avoid alienation from people who wouldn’t understand what it’s like to be them. It’s kind of beautiful (or scary) that no matter how unconventional our beliefs are, we can still find our people. We really aren’t alone in the universe.
“Or what it was, incarnation, three stars / Delivering signs and dusting from their eyes.”
Let’s bring it back to 2005. Illinois opens with a song about UFOs. Well, no. Sufjan actually opens the album with a song about God in which he uses the awe and mystery of a UFO sighting to parallel the seismic presence of God. In the same way that Sufjan misdirects the listener, so has the perception of abductees misdirected the casual observer. Alien abductees are everyday people. They are a hugely ridiculed community who are genuinely afflicted by their abduction, who, like all of us angsty teens (and adults), want to find meaning in “this worthless masquerade of a life we pretend we have.” From my atheist perspective, believing in aliens is no different from believing in gods.
Does that mean that their ideas are logically sound? Absolutely not. Does that mean that we should avoid criticizing believers or any other religious institution? Absolutely not. But maybe less mudslinging and more compassion can go a long way in helping abductees feel human. As long as believers don’t act upon their beliefs in extreme ways, as long as they’re not harassing freshmen on the diag or tearing down the White House, let them believe.
Daily Arts Writer Ben Luu can be reached at benllv@umich.edu.