Abducted (or not)

In October, Susan Clancy’s new book, Abducted : How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens, is being published.

Susan Clancy is the Harvard researcher who back in 1996 designed an experiment to test the validity of repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. She hypothesized that people with recovered memories were more prone than the average person to create false memories, and that they might demonstrate this tendency when given a standard memory test.  She presented the recovered memories subjects with a list of semantically related words, like “candy”, “sour” and “sugar”. Then she tested their recall of those words. On the test, she would throw in words that weren't on the list but were like the words on the list: “sweet” for example. Her hypothesis was that these people would be more inclined to remember seeing the word sweet: creating a false memory out of a contextual inference. As controls, Clancy also tested people who had been sexually abused, but who had not “recovered” these memories (ie they had always remembered their abuse), and people who had not been abused. Clancy found that the recovered memories people had a higher incidence of false memories than both controls, implying their memories of abuse might be false.

Of course, this result was controversial, and she received criticism from victim support groups, professional therapists who specialized in recovered memories and even some of her Harvard Medical School colleagues. However the view that recovered memories are unreliable was not entirely new. For example Elizabeth Loftus has produced much research on creating false memories, and has testified for the defense in many abuse trials (and like Clancy, has also received much hate mail for her trouble).

Clancy then decided to do what any good scientist should do, namely she tried to falsify her hypothesis a different way. This time she would not test memories of abuse, but of something she thought everyone would agree was false: alien abduction. If alien abductees showed no more tendencies to false memories than the controls, her hypothesis on the tendency of abused people to false memories, would be falsified. She performed the experiment, and found that “alien abductees” were also more prone to false memories than the control groups.

As Clancy explains:

What you have in an abductee, Clancy suspects, is someone who is predisposed to believe. ''Here's someone who reads science fiction. They watch 'The X-Files.' Then one night they have a sleep-paralysis experience. It's weird and it's scary, and it becomes one of a multitude of events that create that wonder.''

As the subject tries to remember what happened, ''source'' errors creep in. ''You think you're recovering your own memory, when in fact it's something you pulled out of a movie,'' Clancy said. ''Memory's tendency to be reconstructive, combined with the desire to believe, combined with a culturally available script, leads to a false memory. The content of that memory is dictated by the society you live in.'' The warnings that experiencers report receiving from aliens, the Australian sociologist Robert Bartholomew has pointed out, have changed over time -- from nuclear destruction during the cold war to, more recently, ecological doom. These are simply stories, he says, that give shape to our fears.

Of course, she then got criticism from alien abductee researchers who believed that alien encounters are real. For example:

Obviously there's a mammoth leap of faith involved in generalizing from a mistake on a word list to the assumption that whole memories for extended, anomalous events can be created more or less arbitrarily

… A criticism that completely missed the point of the experiment, which was to see if the hypothesis could be falsified. One of Clancy’s main critics was (the now late) John Mack. Clancy criticized him as a:

''good-hearted,'' an ''old-school gentleman'' who was insufficiently aware of the memory-distorting effects of the hypnosis he used over the years to expand upon abduction memories in many of his more than 200 patients.

What she was getting at is that when memories are recovered using hypnotism it is not possible to tell if the person “remembers” things to please the therapist or if the memories are real.

The only valid criticism of Clancy’s research is that her alien experiment had too few subjects – 11 as I recall. Of course, I would welcome someone else replicating the experiment with a greater number of subjects. However, considering the treatment Clancy received for her troubles, I don’t see many people lining up for the honor. Anyway, Clancy’s results are entirely consistent with what we know about sleep paralysis, and (alleged) alien abduction.

Clancy’s book presumably explains the above in more detail. Obviously, I haven’t read it yet, but I imagine it would be a good read.

Comments

[DisownedSky]

While I think that it's likely that false or distorted memories account for much if not most of the abduction phenomenon, there are immediately serious problems with this research, and not just the very small sample space.

It's clear why her sample space would be low - it's hard to win the trust of abduction claimants, many of which wish their memories would just go away. Some of those who have won their trust have practiced such poor science that the data is effectively lost forever. Selection bias would also be a major concern for this research - who are the abductee population?

Certainly in the abductee population there will be the fantasy-prone types who think The X-Files was a documentary, and would easily confuse a sleep paralysis experience with something anomalous. It seems to me that these types would be more likely to come forward, and will distort the data badly.

If John Mack was right, there should be two modalities here, with the signal being weaker than the noise. It would take a lot more digging to persuade me that he was always wrong. Other research purports to show that abductees are psychologically normal.

[flawedplan]

This is my first attempt at using trackback, since I used this story on my site. Interesting, thanks!

[BronzeDog]

As the subject tries to remember what happened, ''source'' errors creep in.

That reminds me: I need to change my pants. Had one of those dreams where I forgot to wear mine. I switched in the dream, but not in real life.

[Lynn Durham]

Assuming that the (reported) age of the universe of at least 14.7bn yrs as valid, the only axiom as regards aliens, etc. that I might buy is that if anything can happen, it invariably does happen in a multitude of spacetime locales. I find Clancy's presumption that alien abductions cannot happen to be as logically compelling as the the once universal presumption that the earth is the center of the universe. It appears that for some, we are still undergoing the Copernican revolution. What does Clancy say of those who recall meeting and/or being abducted by aliens and who never forgot or never repressed - or had repressed - their memories? At some point, it must be easier for someone to believe honest, credible people who tell amazingly similar stories than to provide elaborate justifications for disbelieving them.

Lynn Durham

[Skeptico]

Lynn:

Re: I find Clancy's presumption that alien abductions cannot happen

Where does she say they cannot happen?

Re: What does Clancy say of those who recall meeting and/or being abducted by aliens and who never forgot or never repressed - or had repressed - their memories?

A false memory does not have to have been repressed. I even had one myself: read this about false memories. Also read about sleep paralysis, which does not require memories to be repressed.

[BronzeDog]

I believe alien abductions can happen: I just don't see any reason to believe they are happening:

First, aliens would likely need to develop faster-than-light travel (or some equivalent cheat, like wormholes), generational ships, and/or effective methods of long-term stasis. All three of these have a lot of barriers making them difficult, if not impossible. Our understanding of physics could very well be wrong, but I'm not going to assume so until they start bumping into falsification.

Second, if aliens had the technology to do the above, I don't think they'd be abducting people: They'd probably be able to collect information in far less intrusive ways.

Third, why expend the effort of coming here? Travelling to our planet from lightyears away would probably require more than a quick stop by the local Chevron station. I may be a bit presumptive, but I imagine intelligent aliens would be fundamentally like us: They'd have an imperfect society with some level of personal selfishness. If the President got on national television and requested a trillion dollars so NASA could fly over to Alpha Centauri just to check if there's any life there, you can bet the population would be against it. About the most enthusiasm I imagine people could muster would be a cheaper automated probe.

Bottom line: All of the above seem to make it an extraordinary claim. Insert extraordinary evidence catch phrase.