Susan A. Clancy - Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens

SUSAN A. CLANCY

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

Copyright 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved

First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2007

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Clancy, Susan A.

Abducted : how people come to believe they were kidnapped by aliens / Susan A. Clancy

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN-13 978-0-674-01879-2 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN-10 0-674-01879-6 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN-13 978-0-674-02401-4 (pbk.)

ISBN-10 0-674-02401-X (pbk.)

1. Alien abduction. I. Title.

BF2050.C56 2005

001.942dc22 2005050245

To my husband,

Niels Ketelhohn

(the alien who abducted me),

and our two daughters,

Caroline and Elinor

T his book could not have been written without Rich McNally and Elizabeth Knoll. I thank Rich for his teaching, guidance, and advice over the past ten years. Had it not been for him, Id probably still be struggling to attach electrodes to drunk lab subjects in William James Hall. His hard work, prolific writing, and scientific clearheadedness are an inspiration to his students and colleagues.

Before I met Elizabeth, my discussions of my research were primarily confined to cocktail party conversation. Not only did she see the potential for a book, but she encouraged me to write it, guiding me step by step through the process and helping to shape the book into something I can be proud of.

Thanks also to Maria Ascher for her thorough and inspired editing of the text (she managed to maintain my voice while clearing up syntactic oddities and grammatical errors); to Harvard University and INCAE in Central America for their institutional support during the writing process; to the abductees who generously shared their experiences with me (needless to say, all of their names have been changed); and to my friends and family for all their love, enthusiasm, and support.

W ill Andrews is an articulate, handsome forty-two-year-old. Hes a successful chiropractor, lives in a wealthy American suburb, and has a strikingly attractive wife and twin boys, age eight. The only glitch in this picture of domestic bliss is that his children are not his wifes they are the product of an earlier infidelity. To complicate matters further, the biological mother is an extraterrestrial.

In Wills mind, alien abductions are real. For the past ten years he has had vivid memories of having been repeatedly taken away by beings and medically, psychologically, and sexually experimented on. During his abductions, he became close to his alien guidea streamlined, sylph-like creature. Although they didnt communicate verbally, he feels they became spiritually connected and their connection resulted in a number of hybrid babies. He never sees his children, but he feels their presence. I know theyre out there, and they know who I am.

Despite the fact that his abductions were traumaticterrifying and often painfulhe is happy he was chosen. Because of them, his life has changed. I was dispirited, confused, going through a down-cycle in my life and a bad patch in my relationship.... I was ready to just give up. I didnt know what was wrong, but I knew something was missing. Today, things are different. I feel great. I know theres something out theremuch bigger, more important than we areand for some reason they chose to make their presence known to me. I have a connection with them. What I do in this life has become less important to methe meaning of today, of now. The beings are learning from us and us from them, and ultimately a new world is being created. And Ill have a part in it, either directly or through the twins.

While Wills life improved, his wife found herself confused, angry, and alienated. This was my husband and all of a sudden he goes from being a normal guy, maybe a little depressed, to being ... well ... kind of nutty, I guess. I dont believe him, but I dont disbelieve him either. I really dont think hes making this up. I think something did happen to him thats been life-changing. I just dont know what it was. I really wish it didnt involve well the sex part, the spiritual connection he talks about. In some ways, I feel that what happened to him must have to do with our relationship. Something must have been missing, and I feel ... a bit angry and sad. Would things have been different if wed been able to have kids? Then again, it all seems so crazy that I dont know what to believe. But I can tell you were pretty happy now.... Things are better.... Basically I deal with it by trying not to think about it too much.

Americans not only are familiar with the idea of abductions, but apparently are starting to believe in them. Polls suggest that about 93 percent of the population believe that extraterrestrials exist, and 27 percent believe that the earth has been visited by aliens. The belief in aliens has increased significantly in the past two decades (along with belief in spiritual healing, extrasensory perception, and communication with the dead). Approximately 85 percent of adults believe there is good evidence that life exists on other planets, and approximately half of those think it is possible that aliens have abducted humans. For what its worth, in the past three years Ive asked just about all the people I know whether they believe that extraterrestrial life exists. No one has given me a flat no. The universe is huge. Why would we be alone?

Still, claims of alien abduction have not been taken seriously by most members of the scientific community.do not count as scientific evidence, and since other types of data are so thin as to be translucent, research on this topic has been primarily confined to enthusiastic fringe groups with no formal scientific training (for example, the Mutual UFO Network, Inc., commonly known as MUFON) and a few scattered academics who arent afraid to sacrifice their professional reputations.

One of these academics was John Mack, a psychiatrist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School for almost fifty years and the founder of the Department of Psychiatry at Cambridge Hospital, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Until the mid-1990s he was best known for his Pulitzer Prizewinning biography of Lawrence of Arabia. Today he is known for another book entirely, one whose title needs no explainingAbduction: Human Encounters with Aliens.

In the 1980s Mack became so interested in claims of alien abduction that he began using hypnosis to retrieve alien-abduction memories from interested participants, memories that he believed were real. In 1994, the year Abduction came out, he stated: There is no evidence that anything other than what abductees are telling us has happened to them.... The people with whom I have been working are telling the truth. After his book received international attention and flabbergasted his colleagues, Harvard Medical School formed an ad hoc committee to investigate his work with abductees. The goal of the investigation, which took fifteen months, was not to challenge Macks right to choose his research topics, but to ensure that whatever topic he chose was studied in a scholarly fashion. This was problematic for Mack because even he thought it was impossible to study the issue of alien abductions in a scientific manner. It just doesnt fit into the Western rationalist tradition of science.