The "Alien Abduction" Phenomenon

Abstract

In this essay, I examine a peculiar, disturbing, and widely reported phenomenon: abduction. Although at first discussed primarily supermarket tabloids, recent years this topic has been featured many books, films, and television programs. Thousands of people, apparently sane and otherwise reliable, report that they are being captured by intelligent, non-human beings, taken on board strange craft, physically examined (often with special interest paid to sexual organs), and returned to the places from which they were taken. Despite the fact that postwar popular culture has been saturated with images and accounts of UFOs and ETs, most people are understandably reluctant to conclude that accounts of alien abduction are veridical. Even though attempting to retain the skepticism that colored my initial assessment of alien abduction several years ago, I now find myself the uncomfortable position of thinking that there may be something to this weird phenomenon. Just what this something is, however, I am unable to say with any assurance, since the phenomenon itself seems to defy most attempts to categorize it terms either as a subjective event ofinner space or as an objective event of outer space. Of one thing I am sure: even if this phenomenon does not involve literal physical abduction of humans by non-human aliens, it merits careful scrutiny not only because thousands of people are suffering connection with repeated abduction experiences, and not only because of the difficulties involved providing an adequate alternative explanation (i.e., an explanation that takes into account all the complexities of abduction narratives), but also because of the potentially important cultural implications posed by the fact that so many evidently rational people are reporting that aliens are dramatically interfering their lives.1 That the abduction phenomenon is frequently discussed popular culture, but is largely ignored by establishment sources is not socially healthy. By generally refusing even to acknowledge the fact that many people are suffering from the abduction phenomenon, much less to fund research to reveal its cause, establishment leaders invite the paranoid fringe to conclude that the government is not only covering up an alien presence, but worse still is somehow league with it. Even the non-paranoid may ask why this phenomenon is not examined more closely by those a position to provide a satisfactory explanation of it. The present essay is an attempt to answer that question. I say in part because an earlier version of this essay, I suggested that alien abduction was merely an instance of the tendency to proscribe attempts to gain knowledge about hidden events. An event is hidden when it conflicts so sharply with accepted views about reality, that the event can scarcely be brought up polite society, much less made into an object for publicly funded research. By foregrounding a critical analysis of the tendency to forbid knowledge about hidden events general, I had hoped to deflect attention from my choice of alien abduction as an example of a hidden event. At the time, I did not want to be viewed as taking the abduction phenomenon too seriously. As its title demonstrates, the present essay continues to examine the more general issue of forbidden knowledge of hidden events. Nevertheless, I decided that it was unfair to leave the reader wondering about my own attitude toward the abduction phenomenon. The fact is that I do regard it as worthy of investigation by people from many different fields. By deciding to foreground the abduction phenomenon this essay, I hope that readers will look into it for themselves, so that I may find philosophical interlocutors willing to discuss this striking phenomenon. In the first of this essay, I argue that the tendency to forbid knowledge about hidden events helps to preserve the prevailing social ontology, i. …