Betty and Barney Hill were the subjects of America’s first famous alien abduction case.1 Folklorist T. E. Bullard catalogued capture, examination, conference, tour, otherworldly journeys, theophany and return as recurring elements of such narratives.2 Investigator Raymond E. Fowler described a typical close encounter of the third kind, Type G, case: witnesses travelling by car see something resembling a plane crashing ahead of them, the car stops, the object disappears, and they later find that two or three hours have passed.3 Fowler said the humanoid described in the Betty Andreasson case was typical of these reports,4 that witnesses afterwards commonly experienced dreams and flashbacks about the missing time,5 and that under hypnotic regression they recalled an abduction and physical examination during which they were told they would not remember it.6 He said several hundred such cases had been investigated fairly thoroughly, often by psychiatrists and psychologists,7 that the witnesses he studied had passed lie-detector tests and character checks,8 and that he did not consider the reports hoaxes, even though it remained unknown whether the events had actually occurred.9
Bill Chalker has investigated abduction claims since the 1970s.10 Drawing on his research into Australian cases from the 1970s to the early 1990s, he said he generally held the view that most abduction cases probably revealed more about the human condition than about UFOs themselves,11 and that the majority were conspicuously lacking in compelling physical evidence,12 with evidence for the reality of abduction remaining lacking or unconvincing even as the phenomenon came to dominate the UFO field.13 He held that treating the scene of an alleged abduction as a crime scene, in a forensic crime-scene approach to alien abduction investigation, was one of the best ways to obtain physical evidence, a direction he said had been advocated for about a decade as of 2005.14 Researcher Victoria Alexander had called in 1993 for a new abduction-research protocol modelled on criminal-investigation techniques.15 Chalker argued that UFO researchers could either continue amid the uncertainty of unverified accounts and unsubstantiated theories, or anchor strange events with forensic and scientific investigation capable of yielding verifiable evidence on the reality of abductions.16
Peter Khoury was unaware of any similar case in the wider UFO literature, and relatively unaware of the abduction phenomenon generally, at the time of his 23 July 1992 bedroom encounter.17 Chalker considered the DNA profiling findings on a hair sample from that encounter to represent potent evidence for a forensic and scientific approach to abduction cases, though subject to continuing review and debate.18 Kary Mullis is the only Nobel Prize laureate to have admitted to a possible alien abduction experience.19 Mullis himself likened abduction phenomena - the seizure of people and subjecting them to experiments - to a form of anthropology conducted at a level not yet understood,20 while considering the idea that an alien culture would need human DNA to survive very unlikely, and finding implausible the scale of alien presence suggested by some of the bleaker abduction tales.21 Chalker felt that while the prospects for a DNA breakthrough from such samples were very small, biochemical and forensic approaches would still offer scientific value,22 that researchers should cooperate in a testing programme focused on DNA profiling,23 and that testing a significant number of legitimate samples would offer a chance to validate the unusual DNA anomalies reported in abduction cases to date.24 The Anomaly Physical Evidence Group (APEG) was formed to focus attention on biological strategies in abduction investigation.25 Chalker regarded the 1993 Kelly Cahill case as one of the few compelling exceptions to the ambiguity pervading the abduction experience.26
During 2002 and 2003, work at Harvard University reignited the idea of psychological mechanisms as a possible explanation for abduction reports.27 According to Hair of the Alien: DNA and Other Forensic Evidence for Alien Abductions, a paper by Susan Clancy and Richard McNally examined false-memory creation in people reporting recovered memories of traumatic events unlikely to have occurred - specifically, abduction by space aliens.28 The study compared three groups: people reporting recovered abduction memories, people who believed they had been abducted but had no memories, and people who denied having been abducted.29 It found that those reporting recovered and repressed memories were more prone than control participants to false recall and recognition,30 with hypnotic suggestibility, depressive symptoms and schizotypic features identified as significant predictors.31 None of the participants interviewed reported continuous memories of abduction that had never been forgotten.32 Memories were instead recovered either in therapy using techniques such as hypnotic regression, or spontaneously after reading books, watching films or seeing television programmes depicting such episodes.33 Chalker countered that a significant number of people reporting abductions do not rely on hypnosis or other therapeutic techniques, their memories instead based on clearly recollected incidents involving no memory loss or delayed recall.34 Robert Shapiro, for his part, rejected stories of UFOs and alien abductions as credible evidence for extraterrestrial life.35
Budd Hopkins documented abductees describing the humanoid figures they encountered as ranging in height from approximately 0.9 metres to nearly 1.5 metres.36 He said the process by which memory of an abduction is suppressed appears imperfect, sometimes leaving partial conscious recollection rather than complete memory loss,37 citing one abductee who experienced roughly two hours of missing time during an abduction but afterwards forgot all events of the following week while continuing his normal routine.38 He also documented a scoop mark with an adjoining straight-line cut on the leg of a woman then about 32 years old, resulting from an event when she was about four, living in France.39 Psychological testing of abductees found deficit patterns similar to those found in tests of rape victims,40 with tested abductees showing lowered self-esteem, a great fear of the outer world, and a lack of trust in their own bodies.41 Hopkins believed abductees were tracked by their genetic lineage, being descendants of people already abducted, so that abductions ran across generations within a bloodline - a form of human-alien hybridisation - rather than occurring randomly.42 One woman abductee made a drawing depicting what she said she had been shown at a facility described as a nursery where foetuses are developed, including an adult-like figure and a small foetus-like being inside a tank-like container.43 Hopkins said he was convinced that in at least three cases a person had been driven to suicide by their abduction experiences,44 and considered that the phenomenon might involve hundreds of thousands of people, possibly more.45 The Ambient Monitoring Project (AMP) had an abductee keep a daily journal of related experiences while a monitoring device was in her home, later matched against the physical data it recorded.46
Whitley Strieber’s own alleged abduction accounts began in 1985-12, at the 1985 Whitley Strieber close encounter at his upstate New York cabin.47 Under forensic hypnosis conducted by Donald Klein, he recalled appearing to have been abducted by aliens rather than assaulted by people wearing masks,48 a session he described as one of the most shocking moments of his life, revealing that the phenomenon had been present in his childhood without his knowing it until then.49 Journalist Ross Coulthart described Strieber as a controversial and leading figure in the study of alleged experiencer close encounters,50 characterising what the reported nonhuman beings did to him - coming to his home, planting implants, attempting to abduct his son Andrew Strieber, taking his sperm, and inflicting wounds and severe trauma - as unfriendly by any definition.51 Andrew Strieber is no longer having encounter experiences and does not remember that aspect of his childhood.52 Erik Nanstiel, describing his own lifelong abductions, said he felt hatred toward the Greys (extraterrestrial beings), angered at being shown children he could never touch, love, hold or know,53 and said he realised the orbs he recalled from childhood were connected to his abductions only after watching an episode of Ancient Aliens that showed cast members discussing orbs on stage at AlienCon in connection with their own encounters.54 He said the beings followed a schedule along family lines, returning every 20 years for a four-year rotation of frequent encounters.55 Chris Ramsay said that although coverage of the abduction phenomenon seemed to have dissipated, many abductees he spoke to disagreed and maintained it was still happening.56 Nanstiel maintained his abductions were always physical rather than non-physical, citing physical symptoms afterwards,57 and said he was paralysed during encounters, able to move his head but not his body.58 On one occasion, he said, he was forced to have intercourse during an abduction, an experience he did not include in his book, Angst in the Shadows.59 He argued that the word “abduction” fails to capture the total loss of agency the Greys impose, controlling a person’s neurology and robbing them of the ability to think clearly, unlike human-on-human abduction, in which a victim retains some measure of control.60 According to Jesse Mitchells, an experiencer present at a Washington DC meeting described in Shirley MacLaine’s Going Within claimed to be part of an alien hybrid programme, and that her foetus went missing three months into the pregnancy;61 Mitchells said a foetus going missing around that stage is a commonly reported element among people interested in the abduction narrative.62 Julia Mossbridge proposed that reported alien visitations may be memories inserted into people’s minds by an agent that understands the informational substrate, rather than events that physically happened, a question that bears on how nonhuman intelligence (NHI) is understood to operate,63 and said telepathy features in the accounts of every person she has heard describe an abduction.64 Ramsay described reported encounters - including with Nordic-type beings described by George Adamski, mantis-like insectoid beings, and greys - as consistently accompanied by a sense of familiarity, love, compassion and calm, and an impression that the beings meant the witness no harm,65 and said the symptoms of sleep paralysis - occurring at night, being awake, paralysed, and feeling real - resemble abduction experiences, making it a fair assumption for some cases.66 He also argued that for every person who has had such experiences and sold a book about them, there are a thousand others telling the same story without one, making the profit-motive dismissal invalid.67 Other commentators have proposed non-extraterrestrial frameworks: Robert Lawlor considered that the extraterrestrial explanation plays into the vanities of the Western evolutionary worldview,68 and suggested that the rise in modern abduction reports might partly reflect the effects of increased industrial energies or electromagnetic pollution on human neural perception,69 while Chalker argued for revisiting possible links between Tuatha de Danann legends, fairy folklore, and modern-day abduction lore.70