(31) Wed 23 Apr 97 20:44 By: David Bloomberg To: All Re: All in the head St: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ @EID:00b4 2297a580 @MSGID: 1:2430/2112 78f641f9 From today's Chicago Tribune: ALIEN ABDUCTION Spacing out Victims of alien abduction may have traveled no further than their therapists' couch By Jeremy Manier TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER UFO abduction stories make prime fodder for conspiracy theorists. If you can believe that little aliens with big heads and bug eyes make a habit of taking people unwillingly up to their spaceship at night, it's just a short step to imagine an organized cover-up of such incidents by a consortium of extraterrestrials and government officials. The researchers who study abduction legends tales, however, see sinister connections of a decidedly earthbound variety. They say that many recent abduction stories, like the false memories of childhood abuse that inspired a huge legal controversy in the past decade, originate not in real experiences but in a psychological therapist's office. One only need ask Len Newman, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who says the similarities between abductees' tales and other mental abnormalities are too close to be a coincidence. "(You see) the same circumstances among people who dig up memories of past lives, false abuse and alien abductions," Newman said. Stories of alien abductions are just the latest demonstration of how reckless therapists can help their patients fashion distorted memories, he said. Unfortunately for the Heaven's Gate suicide cult, most people who say they've been carted off by aliens do not report glimpsing the Kingdom of Heaven. It turns out that, according to them, space is filled with perverse beings more interested in probing our bodies than saving our souls. The question of why people conjure up these evil E.T.s requires insight into both individual psyches and larger cultural trends. The profile for "victims" of alien kidnappings and those who dredge up false memories of abuse follows a sad pattern, noted Newman. "Usually you have people who are disturbed, upset and motivated to dig around in their past to understand why they're feeling that way," he said. "The people who help them often have preconceived notions of what memories they'll find." Hypnosis is invariably the preferred method in such therapies, according to Richard Ofshe, a sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley. And that is part of the problem. "False memories of ritual satanic abuse or of sex-crazed aliens often develop while the patient is under hypnosis," Ofshe said. "You can get people to visualize anything under hypnosis. In the trance you feel like you're reliving something rather than remembering it. It's easy to classify that unusual event as a memory if an authority figure tells you it's a memory." That doesn't explain the horrifying content of most recent UFO accounts, though. The typical abduction story adheres to a script in which victims are degraded, humiliated, stripped of their clothing, strapped to a table and subjected to strange, painful experiments. The evolution of the aliens Such descriptions ring a bell for UIC's Newman. "These sound a lot like the stories people tell when they're weaving masochistic fantasies," Newman said. "If you just white out some of the words like alien and spaceship, you might be hard-pressed to tell the difference between their accounts and what you'll see in masochistic publications. "Believers in the 'abductions' often ask why anyone would make up such stories. But, hey, there are people who pay a lot of money to have experiences very close to this." Our visions of alien visitors didn't always have such a violently medieval quality. The evolution of the creatures described in real-life abduction stories parallels a grim turn in the movie images of aliens, from figures of peace to the monsters of "Independence Day." Back in the 1950s, the first alien celebrity was the almost saintly Klaatu from the movie "The Day the Earth Stood Still." News accounts of other-worldly visits from that time also depicted aliens on a kindly mission. In 1952, one year after Klaatu entered the public imagination, one George Adamski reported contact with aliens in the Mojave Desert who gave him an urgent warning about the perils of atomic weaponry. And groups with names such as "The Contactees" told of encounters in which they were instructed to take a message of peace back to the people of Earth. Many of those who made those early UFO reports were just naive space enthusiasts, Berkeley's Ofshe explained. "They were your typical nerdy, shy, bright engineer types," he said. All that started to change in 1961 when Betty and Barney Hill claimed they were violently abducted while driving through the woods in Canada. Subsequent accounts from others amplified the Hills' vision of sadistic UFO fiends, leading to today's reports of a vast alien-human forced-breeding program. The new stories come from a different population than nerdy engineers, according to Ofshe. "These are people with problems, looking for therapy," he said. Recent "abductees" also tend to share the demographic background of most masochism aficionados, Newman claims. "The stereotype of a person who says they've been taken aboard a spaceship is of some hillbilly or redneck," Newman said. "But that's not true at all; if anything, middle-class professionals are more likely to be 'abductees.' " What accounts for the brutal turn in UFO yarns? Elizabeth Loftus, a University of Washington psychologist who specializes in the fallibility of human memory, thinks the answer could be quite simple. "You get more attention these days if you tell a story with sex in it," she said. Blaming the therapists Ofshe paints a more complicated and disturbing picture, centering on what he calls "the death throes of the psychodynamic paradigm." "The flow of clinical quackery was in this direction anyway," Ofshe said, referring to the flowering of recovered memory therapy in the late '80s. He says that therapists are desperate to find additional treatable disorders now that effective drugs have been found for most major mental illnesses. "This is just one more attempt to repopulate the offices of clinical psychologists," Ofshe said. The warped transformation in abduction stories has meant social isolation for the people who tell them, according to Washington's Loftus. Yet, she thinks the tightly knit groups of believers also get down-to-earth psychological benefits. "In the alien abduction community you get reinforcement for your beliefs, develop new friendships, and see your life take on an interesting twist." Loftus echoed Newman's suggestion that abduction stories may even be preferable to recovered memory claims that rip apart entire families. "Whatever need this is filling," she said, "it might be better to do it with alien abduction memories instead of 'Daddy did it and so did Uncle and Grandpa.' At least fewer families will be destroyed in the process." --- msgedsq 2.0.5 * Origin: Let the love of truth shine clear (1:2430/2112) SEEN-BY: 12/12 24/888 102/2 106/2000 109/7 124/1 130/1 1008 133/2 140/23 SEEN-BY: 143/1 147/34 2021 154/222 167/166 170/400 202/777 1207 1919 SEEN-BY: 213/213 218/2 801 890 900 901 907 244/1500 267/200 270/101 275/429 SEEN-BY: 280/1 169 282/1 62 310/666 323/107 343/600 346/250 356/18 371/42 SEEN-BY: 377/86 380/64 382/92 396/1 2 45 690/660 730/2 732/10 2401/0 SEEN-BY: 2442/0 3603/420 3606/10 3612/41 3615/50 3619/25 3632/21 3651/9 SEEN-BY: 3652/1 3667/1 3674/1 5100/8 @PATH: 2430/1 1423 270/101 396/1 218/907 801