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Cultic Studies Review,
Vol. 6, No. 1, 2007
Abducted: How People Come to
Believe They Were Abducted by Aliens
Susan A. Clancy
Harvard University Press. October 31, 2005. ISBN 0-674-01879-6 (hardcover),
$22.95. 162 pages (179 pages including references)
When first asked to review a book on alien abduction, I
confess I had doubts. This is not about a charismatic leader who, like Marshall
Applewhite, controlled his follower’s lives and deaths. The second half of the
title was what caught my attention: How People Come to Believe…. I spent
more than 10 years helping people understand how, without any tangible evidence,
they came to believe their pastor, imam, guru, counselor, or son or brother was
unique, worthy of extraordinary honor or incarnate deity. This is clearly not a
book about thought reform, at least as we would like to know it. It is, however,
a book about thought, and its presence and absence in people’s experience. And
this is where Ms. Clancy’s accessible but carefully written work fits within the
goals of this publication and its field of study.
Not content to speculate on motives, drives, or factors
within or outside of those who believe aliens abducted them, Ms. Clancy asked
the “abductees” themselves. She sees her work as following Harvard psychologist
William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience in that she takes the
experiences of her subjects seriously, but not literally. She is a true skeptic.
She questions the literal experiences of those she studied, but at the same time
calmly dismantles simplistic arguments. Those she studied are not easy to
dismiss as “scientifically illiterate, cognitively challenged, logically
impaired, or … talking complete and utter nonsense.”
She found three reasons people find alien abduction
accounts compelling: They feel real to the participants; the stories from every
culture and country appear, at least in a few aspects, remarkably similar; and
the “sheer number and variety” of those people who had the experience are
impressive. She points out that abductees are “no more likely than anyone else
to suffer from psychiatric disorders”; and while they do “score highly on
measures of creativity or proneness to fantasy,” she points out that many others
with high scores never claimed to have been abducted.
This description should sound familiar to anyone who reads
this publication. The same has been said in these pages for years with regard to
members of cults. Ms. Clancy underscores the importance of understanding the
“very human trait” to believe in “weird beliefs.” This is important, she says,
because “believing weird things may prove harmful for the believer.” Conversely,
she later finds that most of those she interviewed felt they benefited
from the experience, however terrifying, in ways that count. Life had more
meaning to them.
Finally, she compares abductee-believers to those who
believe in Christianity. Readers might object to her implication that both must
be accepted without any physical evidence. Mainstream Christian theologians
emphasize experiences must not be taken as equal to those articles of faith that
have at least some historical basis. Nevertheless, her point is well made that a
largely unverifiable experience, whether “weird”
or more socially acceptable, can enhance people’s quality of life.
Many in this human rights’ field of cultic studies have
sincere but in some ways unverifiable beliefs themselves. We find meaning in
helping our fellow believers, whatever their beliefs may be, with the effects or
aftereffects of experiences in which their sincerity has been hijacked for the
gain or aggrandizement of another. The study of cults is about accountability,
not for what people think or believe, but in the context that all people in all
communities should be permitted and encouraged to think clearly and critically
about every aspect of their belief.
Abduction: Why People Come to Believe They Were
Kidnapped by Aliens is a sensitive addition to the knowledge base that can
help people understand how it is possible for almost anyone to believe almost
anything, given the right circumstances.
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