Americans love conspiracy theories, frequently involving the government and/or aliens.

Susan Clancy has a new book: Abducted : How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens. Apparently, it’s just as inflamatory as her prior book about false memories in sexual abuse victims. (She says these alien memories are just as false as most repressed memories “found” in therapy sessions.) I remember her scholars’ convocation lecture at Grinnell being rather confrontational, though I found it fascinating.

Science is not so open-minded as it seems, she says, and is bowing out of repressed memory research.

You can watch Prof. Clancy talk about her book.

“These people were surprisingly normal and sane.”

“A lot of us, perhaps most of us, are looking for explanations for things that have happened to us in our lives and [account] for psychological distress or anomylous experiences. So what normally happens…Like, no one goes to bed and wakes up screaming, ‘Holy god, I’ve been abducted by aliens!’ It doesn’t happen that way. What happens is that people have some experiences or symptoms they’re trying to understand it, and they wonder, ‘I wonder, could this be aliens.’”

“Being abducted is a culturally available way to explain experiences you’ve had. . . . We know what aliens look like, and we know what they can do to us.” Most of us know more about alien abductions than we do about mental illness and psychological trauma.

About 10% of abductees have developed vivid memories. Almost all have undergone hypnosis or regression therapy involving suggestable states where false (but very powerful) memories are easily created.

The experiences were terrifying and awful, but they are transformative, cathartic, spiritual (almost religious) events, too. It’s just a new kind of belief system.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

(Thanks to Alex Barnett.)