Alien Abduction Research Articles

Parental Perceptions of Child Abduction Phenomenon in Primary School (A Field Study of a Sample of Parents in the City of Touggourt)

The phenomenon of kidnapping has affected society in general and families in particular, through the alteration of many values that have negatively impacted the community.

An encounter with the self: A thematic and content analysis of the DMT experience from a naturalistic field study.

N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is an endogenous serotonergic psychedelic capable of producing radical shifts in an experience that have significant implications for consciousness and its neural correlates, especially given the "disconnected consciousness" suggested by the "breakthrough" DMT state. Its increasing usage and clinical trial indicate the growing importance of a thorough elucidation of the experience's qualitative content, over and above the phenomenological structure. This is particularly in light of the intensely pervasive effects of DMT occasions in all dimensions of the self, which are often ontologically challenging yet potentially transformative. This is the second report on the first naturalistic field study of DMT use exploring its qualitative analysis. Screened, healthy, anonymized, and experienced DMT users were observed during their non-clinical use of the drug at home (40-75-mg inhaled). In-depth semi-structured interviews, inspired by the micro-phenomenological technique, were employed immediately after their experience. This study reports on the thematic and content analysis of one major domain of the breakthrough experiences elicited, the "self"; where analyses of the "other" were previously reported. A total of 36 post-DMT experience interviews with mostly Caucasian (83%) men (eight women) of a mean of 37 years were predominantly inductively coded. Invariably, profound and highly intense experiences occurred. The first overarching category comprised the onset of effects, encompassing super-ordinate themes including sensory, emotion and body, and space-time shifts; the second category comprised bodily effects, encompassing themes including pleasurable, neutral/both, and uncomfortable; the third category comprised the sensorial effects, encompassing open-eye, visual, and cross-modal and other; the fourth comprised the psychological effects, encompassing memory and language, awareness and sense of self, and time distortions; and the fifth comprised the emotional effects, encompassing positive, neither/both, and challenging experiences. Many further subthemes also illuminate the rich content of the DMT experience. The present study provides a systematic and nuanced analysis of the content of the breakthrough DMT state pertaining to one's personal and self-referential experiences of the body, senses, psychology, and emotions. The resonances both with previous DMT studies and other types of extraordinary experiences, such as the alien abduction, shamanic and near-death experiences, are also elaborated upon. Putative neural mechanisms and their promise as a psychotherapeutic agent, especially owing to deep emotional impact, are discussed.

Alienation and Aliens: A Comparative Study of Narratives of Abduction in Historical African and UFO Experiences

Abstract This article examines the racial dimensions of UFO abduction narratives by comparing the structural elements of these narratives with historical accounts of African enslavement. It is suggested that UFO abduction narratives from White Americans, which make up an overwhelming majority of such accounts, comes from collective feelings of widespread culpability for the enslavement and profiting from African persons. It is suggested that the UFO abduction experience is a way to overcome such pervasive feelings of guilt by establishing a new power dynamic that reverses the roles of victim and victimizer and mirrors closely historical accounts of abduction. Furthermore, it seeks to add to the discourse surrounding race and the conception of the extraterrestrial.

Review: Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO, by David J. Halperin

Review: <i>Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO</i>, by David J. Halperin

Starships and Slave Ships

Abstract Evidence suggests that the UFO/alien abduction phenomenon is exclusively experienced by white people in the United States. But while scholars have probed abductee narratives to surface political and symbolic anxieties for decades, none have thought of the phenomenon’s whiteness alongside the archival absence of Black abductees. Using abductee accounts, interdisciplinary studies of the UFO abduction phenomena, and critiques of Black subjectivity, this article attends to the ontological anxieties that permeate UFO abduction narratives and their choreographic resonance with the psychosomatics of Black life. This article begins by examining the exceptional narrative of Barney Hill, America’s first and thus far only popular Black abductee. Then it brings into focus UFOlogy’s aporetic negation of racial subjectivity and suggests that the UFO abduction phenomenon is, a posteriori, inaccessible to the Black nonsubject. Finally, it returns to Hill’s experience and offers speculative implications of a libidinal relationship between the starship’s technics and the slave ship’s terror.

The Believer: Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack by Ralph Blumenthal

I remember the golden era of UFO abduction research. In 1966 John G. Fuller published The Interrupted Journey and suddenly everyone seemed to know the strange story of Barney and Betty Hill taken from their car by aliens and subjected to medical examinations aboard a flying saucer. The whole town talked about it, so did the whole country. Only ufologists held back, having learned the hard way that the more sensational a UFO story sounded, the more likely it stood on evidential legs too slender to support it. UFOs enjoyed newsworthiness and unaccustomed respect this year; it was no time to puncture the swelling goodwill by falling for a fake, fantasy, or honest mistake (Bullard 2018).&#x0D; Still, this case was different. The Hills were highly respected in their community, Fuller was a Saturday Review columnist, and Dr. Benjamin Simon, the psychiatrist who recovered memories of the Hills’ period of missing time by means of hypnosis, was a pillar of his profession. Incredible as the story sounded, it unfolded with credible verisimilitude. It told us more about the aliens and their spaceship than any previous trustworthy report. It even made sense according to the prevailing conception that aliens arrived as explorers like our astronauts, their mission to observe, collect soil samples, and doubtless to study the numerous large mammals having the technology to ride around in four-wheeled machines.

A Thomistic Metaphysics of Participation Accounts for Embodied Rationality

Rationality should not be seen as a ghostly process exclusive of the world of matter, but rather as a transcendent process within matter itself by virtue of a participated power. A Thomistic metaphysics of embodied participation in being effectively answers Robert Pasnau’s objection that the standard hylomorphic account confuses ontological and representational immateriality, and is more satisfying than nonreductive physicalist accounts of rationality, and the Anglo-American hylomorphic accounts reliant on formal causality. When the active intellect is understood as a participated power and not as a formal or constitutive principle of rationality, the transcendent basis of rationality is clarified; all embodied rational operations are seen to utilize, without being reduced to, a substrate of neurophysiological systems, processes and structures. I utilise an allegory of alien abduction, to illustrate participation as a key to understanding the intrinsic relationship between transcendent, immaterial thought and embodiment.

Clinical evidence in the phenomenon of Alien Abduction

Purpose: Starting from the classic definition of “alien abduction”, the present research, starting from the study published in 2020 on the proposed clinical classification of this particular phenomenon, is aimed at confirming the theoretical assumption of psychopathological origin. Methods: Clinical interview, based on narrative-anamnestic and documentary evidence and the basis of the Perrotta Human Emotions Model (PHEM) concerning their emotional and perceptual-reactive experience, and administration of the battery of psychometric tests published in international scientific journals by the author of this work: 1) Perrotta Integrative Clinical Interviews (PICI-2), to investigate functional and dysfunctional personality traits; 2) Perrotta Individual Sexual Matrix Questionnaire (PSM-Q), to investigate the individual sexual matrix; 3) Perrotta Affective Dependence Questionnaire (PAD-Q), to investigate the profiles of affective and relational dependence; 4) Perrotta Human Defense Mechanisms Questionnaire (PDM-Q), to investigate the defence mechanisms of the Ego. Results: Preliminary results from the interviews and the anamnestic form would suggest that the phenomenon of alien abductions has a greater tendency to occur in the female group, in the adult and mature group (and tends to diminish but not disappear with advancing age) and in the group geographically originating in central-northern Italy (due to lower religious influences but greater openness to the typical contents of ufological and mystery narratives). Moreover, the subsequent results would lead us to deduce with almost total certainty, concerning the selected sample, that the phenomenon of alien abductions has an absolute prevalence in the believing population concerning the existence of paranormal phenomena per se, even in the absence of objective and/or scientific evidence. It is a phenomenon that is almost completely linked (110/112, 98.2%) to a medium-low or not fully educated cultural level. Based on the PICI-2 it emerged that the primary emerging disorder is alternatively the delusional disorder, the dissociative disorder and the narcissistic disorder; followed, as secondary disorders, by the delusional disorder (if it is not considered as primary disorder), the schizoid disorder, the borderline disorder, the obsessive disorder and the psychopathic disorder. The analysis of functional traits also reported the marked dysfunctional tendency of the classes referring to self-control, sensitivity, Ego-Es comparison, emotionality, ego stability, security and relational functionality, confirming here too the marked dysfunctional tendency of the clinical population. According to the PSM-Q, almost 2/3 of the participants (73/112, 65.2%) present a dysfunctional tendency to sexual behaviour and a marked tendency to chronicle feelings of shame in avoidance behaviour or hyposexuality. Furthermore, 100% of the sample of the population surveyed report having suffered significant or serious psychological or physical abuse at a young age, or intra-parental relational imbalances, or in any case a sexual upbringing that was not open and lacking in free communication. According to the PDM-Q, 27.7% (31/112) are affected by affective dependency, with greater emphasis on types I (neurotic), VI (covert narcissist), V (borderline) and III (histrionic), in that order of descent. Finally, the PDM-Q reveals the widespread psychopathological tendency of the functional ego framework for the mechanisms of isolation, denial, regression, reactive formation, denial, projection, removal, withdrawal, instinct, repression and idealisation. Conclusion: This research confirms the psychopathological nature of the alien abduction phenomenon, which deserves to be treated using a psychotherapeutic approach (preferably cognitive-behavioural and/or strategic) and possibly also pharmacological in serious cases, depending on the symptoms manifested and the severity of the morbid condition.

An Encounter With the Other: A Thematic and Content Analysis of DMT Experiences From a Naturalistic Field Study.

Introduction: N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is an endogenous serotonergic psychedelic capable of producing radical shifts in conscious experience. Increasing trends in its use, as well as new trials administering DMT to patients, indicate the growing importance of a thorough elucidation of the qualitative content, over and above structure, which the drug occasions. This is particularly in light of the hyper-real, otherworldly, and often ontologically challenging yet potentially transformative, nature of the experience, not least encounters with apparently non-self social agents. Laboratory studies have been limited by clinical setting and lacking qualitative analyses of experiential content, while online surveys’ limitations lie in retrospective design, uncontrolled use, and both of which not guaranteeing ‘breakthrough’ experiences, i.e., producing very strong psychoactive effects.Methods: We report on the first naturalistic field study of DMT use including its qualitative analysis. Screened, healthy, anonymised and experienced DMT users were observed during their non-clinical use of the drug at home (40–75 mg inhaled). In-depth semi-structured interviews (inspired by the micro-phenomenological technique) were employed immediately after their experience. This paper reports on the thematic analysis of one major domain of the breakthrough experiences elicited, the ‘other’. Thirty-six post-DMT experience interviews with mostly Caucasian (83%) males (eight female) of average 37 years were predominantly inductively coded.Results: Invariably, profound and highly intense experiences occurred. The first overarching category comprised the encounter with other ‘beings’ (94% of reports), encompassing super-ordinate themes including the entities’ role, appearance, demeanour, communication and interaction; while the second overarching category comprised experiences of emerging into other ‘worlds’ (100% of reports), encompassing super-ordinate themes of the scene, the contents and quality of the immersive spaces. Many further mid-level themes and subthemes also illuminate the rich content of the DMT experience.Discussion: The present study provides a systematic and in-depth analysis of the nuanced content of the otherworldly encounter within the breakthrough DMT experience, as well as elaborating on the resonances both with previous DMT studies focusing on entity encounters and other types of extraordinary experiences entailing such encounters. These include the alien abduction, folkloric, shamanic and near-death experience. Putative neural mechanisms of these features of the DMT experience and its promise as a psychotherapeutic agent are discussed in light of such findings.

Post-traumatic stress disorder, suggestibility, and dissociation related to alleged alien abductions

ObjectivesThousands of people throughout the world are convinced that they have been abducted by aliens. We aimed to assess the emotional reaction to such an implausible event and propose some explanations alternative to severe psychopathology. MethodsA total of 19 individuals who reported memories of having been abducted by aliens were compared to a control group of 32 participants. We employed a battery of tests measuring post-traumatic stress disorder, suggestibility, and dissociation within all participants. ResultsThe abductee group showed higher scores in measures of post-traumatic stress disorders and dissociation, but lower in suggestibility. Nevertheless, these differences were statistically significant only in suggestibility. ConclusionsThe emotional reaction to memories of an implausible experience can be similar to an individual's response to a genuinely traumatic event. Dissociation might be involved in the clarification of some cases. Explanations alternative to psychosis for these testimonies are proposed.

Beliefs and opinions about the existence of life outside the earth: The UFO Experiences Questionnaire (UFO-Q)

Abstract Unidentified Flying Objects (also called UFO) are usually related to the magical beliefs that accept the existence of extraterrestrial beings and alien abductions. Therefore, UFO experiences describe contacts with UFOs, extraterrestrial beings, covert alien visits and abductions. Although science provides enough advances that bet for the existence of life outside the earth, these experiences have been related and equated with paranormal beliefs under an integrative model given the magical content they manifest. The following paper presents a psychosocial study based on the statistical justification of the UFO Experiences Questionnaire (UFO-Q), which examines the underlying dimensions of UFO experiences and beliefs, as well as their social impact on the Spanish-speaking culture. The sample was of non-probabilistic convenience and consisted of 404 subjects selected from the Spanish general population. The Factorial Analyses confirmed that UFO experiences can be represented based on four dimensions: Extraterrestrial Beliefs (C1), Extraterrestrial Experiences (E1), Fearful Extraterrestrial Beliefs (T1) and Form Beliefs (C2). The analysis of items suggested that these beliefs could present two cognitive models: On the one hand, there is the magical-divergent model (irrational thinking), and on the other hand, there is also the critical-divergent (rational thinking). However, the Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analysis questioned both models because they only allowed the identification of the magical-divergent dimension (factor C2). This result invites us to review the validity of the integrative model that associate paranormal contents with extraterrestrial beliefs. Would it be possible that the relationship between both types of beliefs occurred only in the magical-divergent model?

Embodiment, Abstraction, and Hidden Reproductive History

Embodiment, Abstraction, and Hidden Reproductive History Mary McGlynn (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Promotional still, The 8th documentary film, 2021, directed and produced by Aideen Kane, Lucy Kennedy, Maeve O'Boyle, and Alan Maher. [End Page 130] Crowds dominate the publicity stills used to promote the 2020 documentary The 8th about the repeal of the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution (1983), which had essentially outlawed all abortions in Ireland.1 One vivid image from the celebration after the vote features a woman—Lysette Golden—elevated above the rest of those gathered; she sits on a man's shoulders, smiling and holding a banner from the "Together for Yes" movement. Golden wears a snug white crop top that has two rainbow-hued alien heads at roughly the level of her breasts, the iconic inverted-egg shape of the head repeated in the blank eyes. Although there is no evidence to suspect that this activist chose her shirt to link aliens to reproductive politics, the imagery is nevertheless fortuitous, educing a familiar trope of baby-as-alien-invader. In her essay collection Making Babies Anne Enright links pregnancy and abuse by priests with alien abduction to discuss reproductive rights in Ireland. Her elliptical chapter "Breeding" registers how clerical sexual abuse has often been dismissed as imagined—a fanciful idea on par with impregnation by a spaceman—as though aliens and priests were both races of "higher beings" who "gaze deep into our eyes and force us to have babies against our will" (15). Remarking that pregnancy is often an unwanted surprise ("We do not choose, sometimes, to be occupied by this other creature"), Enright juxtaposes this sense of invasive violation with the recovered memories of alien abductees: "What they remember, eventually, is a hidden reproductive history," a concept that she in [End Page 131] turn links to the suppressed or ignored narratives of sexual abuse at the hands of priests (21, 18). She also gestures toward the lack of access to contraceptives, an aspect of how the institution of the Catholic church forces Irish women to have babies. We might ask why Enright bothers with the aliens at all, given that the Irish sexual histories that she discusses already conjoin neatly, with priests and babies both imposing themselves, secretive and unasked. The answer would seem to lie in the ways that the figure of the alien activates the uncanny, something at once like us and unlike us, part of us and utterly different. Enright's analogy juxtaposes popular conceptions of aliens with photographs of a gestating fetus, with both rendered floating in space with nonreflective eyes: It drifts free, like an astronaut on his umbilical cable; glowing; weightless; with pads for fingers, and plum-like, radioactive eyes. The foetus sees nothing, knows everything. … It is a different life form. The foetus has no capacity for wonder. There is something blank and mean-spirited about it, perhaps. It lurks. It is all potential. (21) This description corresponds to Julie Roberts's observation that technologies for creating images of a fetus in utero frequently generate depictions that exclude the maternal body.2 Both Roberts and Enright recognize the power of the image of the fetus as isolated, different, and indifferent. In Enright's description we can see echoes of Donna Haraway's "god trick" as well as Yeats's rough beast, "its gaze blank and pitiless as the sun" (line 15).3 More than mere animal, however, this creature is otherworldly, outside of human systems of knowing and of marking time. The collapse of time via Enright's reference to "potential" in the above passage is central to long-standing efforts to control female reproductive rights by patriarchal and religious authorities. These efforts transform a woman from a person with agency into a vehicle for a larger will, an imperative from God, [End Page 132] nature, or even the state to bring to fulfillment a new life. A pregnant woman becomes important primarily for her body's futurity.4 Judy Rohrer references this sort of potentiality in a U.S. context when she traces a history of concerns about "reproductive futurity—the way the iconic fetus or...

Extraterrestrials in the Stacks: An Archivist’s Journey with Alien Abduction, A Stained Blue Dress, and the Betty and Barney Hill Collection

Extraterrestrials in the Stacks: An Archivist’s Journey with Alien Abduction, A Stained Blue Dress, and the Betty and Barney Hill Collection

Sleep Paralysis and the Structure of Waking

Sleep dysfunction may be a state, throughout arousal or falling asleep, within which an individual is aware however una ble to manoeuvre or speak. throughout associate degree episode, one could perceive (hear, feel, or see things that don't seem to be there), which regularly leads to worry. Episodes usually last but one or two of minutes. It’s going to occur as one episode or be perennial. The condition could occur in those that are otherwise healthy or those with hypersomnia, or it's going to run in families as a results of specific genetic changes. The condition is triggered by sleep deprivation, psychological stress, or abnormal sleep cycles. The underlying mechanism is believed to involve a dysfunction in rapid eye movement. identification is predicated on a human description. different conditions which will gift equally embody hypersomnia, atonic seizure, and hypokalae mia periodic dysfunction. Treatment choices for sleep dysfunction are poorly studied. It’s suggested that folks be confident that the condition is common and usually not serious. Different efforts that will be tried embody sleep hygiene, psychological feat ure activity medical aid, and antidepressants. Between 8 May 1945 and five hundred of individual’s expertise sleep dysfunction at some purpose in their life. concerning five hitter of individuals have regular episodes. Males and females are affected equall y. Sleep dysfunction has been delineated throughout history. it's believed to own vie a task within the creation of stories concerning alien abduction and different paranormal events.

Alien Abduction Experience: Definition, neurobiological profiles, clinical contexts and therapeutic approaches

Starting from the general concept of “alien abduction experience”, the present work focuses on the essential aspects of the disorder defining the clinical and diagnostic contexts, laying the foundations for correct differential diagnosis, without neglecting the neural characteristics elaborated in the scientific community. The discussion concludes with the best therapeutic approaches suggested on the subject, paying particular attention to analyzing the related profiles and those related to the presumed discovery of alien implants in the human body of patients.

Unimpaired abduction to alien abduction: Lessons on delusion formation

ABSTRACT An examination of alien abduction belief can inform how we ought to approach constructing explanations of monothematic delusion formation. I argue that the formation and maintenance of alien abduction beliefs can be explained by a one-factor account, and that this explanatory power generalizes to (other) cases of monothematic delusions. There are no differences between alien abduction beliefs and monothematic delusions which indicate the need for additional explanatory factors in cases of the latter. I make the additional point that whilst alien abduction beliefs can be readily explained using a one-factor framework, the two-factor framework requires adjustment to accommodate them. I conclude that theorists interested in delusion formation have much to learn from the case of alien abduction belief.

Survey of entity encounter experiences occasioned by inhaled N,N-dimethyltryptamine: Phenomenology, interpretation, and enduring effects.

Experiences of having an encounter with seemingly autonomous entities are sometimes reported after inhaling N,N-dimethyltryptamine. The study characterized the subjective phenomena, interpretation, and persisting changes that people attribute to N,N-dimethyltryptamine-occasioned entity encounter experiences. Two thousand, five hundred and sixty-one individuals (mean age 32 years; 77% male) completed an online survey about their single most memorable entity encounter after taking N,N-dimethyltryptamine. Respondents reported the primary senses involved in the encounter were visual and extrasensory (e.g. telepathic). The most common descriptive labels for the entity were being, guide, spirit, alien, and helper. Although 41% of respondents reported fear during the encounter, the most prominent emotions both in the respondent and attributed to the entity were love, kindness, and joy. Most respondents endorsed that the entity had the attributes of being conscious, intelligent, and benevolent, existed in some real but different dimension of reality, and continued to exist after the encounter. Respondents endorsed receiving a message (69%) or a prediction about the future (19%) from the experience. More than half of those who identified as atheist before the experience no longer identified as atheist afterwards. The experiences were rated as among the most meaningful, spiritual, and psychologically insightful lifetime experiences, with persisting positive changes in life satisfaction, purpose, and meaning attributed to the experiences. N,N-dimethyltryptamine-occasioned entity encounter experiences have many similarities to non-drug entity encounter experiences such as those described in religious, alien abduction, and near-death contexts. Aspects of the experience and its interpretation produced profound and enduring ontological changes in worldview.

Take me up, I want to go: Captivity, disorientation and affect in the neurosphere

ABSTRACTCaptivity narratives have been a core American genre for centuries. This paper suggests that some American captivity narratives are opening into emergent attempts to articulate social feeling at a moment of precarity. I treat captivity here not just as a narrative, genre or trope but also as an affect. I explore how neurodivergent young people evoke disorientation and captivity on Tumblr as an expression of identity. I show how the bloggers share a feeling with UFO abduction narratives in creating an atmosphere of difference.

Review of No Return: The Gerry Irwin Story. UFO Abduction or Covert Oper-ation? by David Booher

Review of No Return: The Gerry Irwin Story. UFO Abduction or Covert Oper-ation? by David Booher

41St Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays

Reviewed by: 41St Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays Scott T. Cummings 41ST ANNUAL HUMANA FESTIVAL OF NEW AMERICAN PLAYS. Actors Theatre of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky. 04 7–9, 2017. The first Humana Festival that Les Waters programmed as the artistic director of the Actors Theatre of Louisville took place in spring 2013. Since then the scripts featured at this venerable old showcase for new American plays have tended to fall into two categories: ones that Waters wants to direct, and all the rest. In recent years he has staged the premieres of Gnitby Will Eno, Glory of the Worldby Charles L. Mee, and For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthdayby Sarah Ruhl. These are not the early career playwrights often included in the festival. Each of them has shared a long association with Waters and established a unique theatrical voice that skews toward his penchant for the quirky and off-kilter. In a more ominous fashion than Eno, Mee, or Ruhl, Jorge Cortiñas's Recent Alien Abductions, the Humana debut play that Waters directed in 2017, also skews toward the unconventional. It begins with a twenty-five-minute monologue delivered by a teenager named Álvaro about an episode of The X-Filesin which Fox Mulder travels to Puerto Rico on the track of alien conspiracy and encounters a mysterious boy who is later abducted. As Álvaro, Jon Norman Schneider stood stock still in a spotlight down center surrounded by haze and a frame of light as he analyzed this episode with wonder and suspicion, introducing thematic questions that cast a long shadow over the action that followed. That action unfolded in Álvaro's family home in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, twenty-three years later. Álvaro, it turns out, grew up, dropped out of university, moved to New York years ago, eventually became a successful writer, and then committed suicide. Now his friend Patria has come to seek permission from the family he left behind to publish a collection of his short stories. But his older brother Néstor, played with brooding menace by Bobby Plasencia, is reluctant, and Patria's efforts to work around his resistance lead to an eruption of violence that sends her scurrying back to New York without the signed release form she needs. Waters staged the action with a careful hand on a simple realistic interior set surrounded by a lot of empty space. The blocking was conspicuously static—one scene took place out of sight, with the dialogue heard from another room—and the insistent stillness promoted a sense of anxious anticipation. On a superficial level Recent Alien Abductionscan be seen as a conventional domestic drama built around a contested document, a dark family secret, and a violent confrontation that changes everything. But when the play concluded with the young Álvaro talking about another, alleged episode of The X-Files, it became clear that Cortiñas is proposing a complex metaphor for contemporary US–Puerto Rican geopolitics, one that resists reduction to simple allegory or arguments about Puerto Rican independence. Instead, the play generates a lingering, almost creepy sense of discomfort and the hint that "the truth is out there" about Puerto Rico for anyone with the will to go after it. In contrast, as directed by associate artistic director Meredith McDonough, Chelsea Marcantel's Airnessoffered a straightforward feel-good story that was both familiar and enjoyable. The play introduced the audience to a group of eccentric characters with colorful nicknames and a serious passion for air guitar, each of whom is pursuing a national championship and the ineffable quality of perfection known simply as "airness." The story, such as it is, traces the rise of Nina, who thinks air guitar is lame because she plays a real guitar in a real band, from neophyte to national champ. It turns out that she also has a romantic score to settle with her ex-lover, ex-bandmate, and reigning champ "D Vicious" (Brian Quijada), but all this narrative is mainly the armature for a series of songs and scenes that amount to a crash course in Air Guitar. With sincerity, good humor, and a forgivable touch of...