What are the tinfoil hat set saying?

January 22, 2007 3:13 PM

I'm trying to find published accounts of alien abduction experiences, particularly those that involve missing time. Either first-hand narratives are okay, or transcripts of peoples' accounts would work, too.

Basically, I am writing a paper on alien abduction experiences. I have seen a lot of texts that refer to particular cases (ie Betty and Barney Hill) but what I would like are more immediate accounts, in the words of the abductees.

posted by synecdoche to society & culture (12 comments total)

I own a copy of Susan Hiller's Witness which was done as an art project but its basically a book with first-hand account after first-hand account and an accompanying CD with each of the witnesses teling their stories in their own words.
posted by vacapinta at 3:22 PM on January 22, 2007

Maybe you already know the books by David M. Jacobs. One that's on this topic is called "Secret Life: Firsthand, Documented Accounts of UFO Abductions"

I heard him on a radio program and was surprised to learn he was an alumnus of my university--uw-madison--and wrote one of the first doctoral dissertations on the subject of UFO's

See Jacobs' organisation http://www.ufoabduction.com/index.htm

I'm not sure what I think about any of that!
posted by subatomiczoo at 3:31 PM on January 22, 2007

My personal favorite abductee, the wacky mess that is Pamela Stonebrooke, comes to mind... although I'm not sure I'd ever quote her for any kind of paper to be taken seriously. (Apparently she had some pretty hot sex with reptilians though... 'cuz she REALLY likes to talk about it.)
By the way... this woman is NO jazz singer. No no no.
posted by miss lynnster at 4:08 PM on January 22, 2007

This isn't published, unless you count an AskMe answer as a publication. It's also not exactly an alien abduction experience, as I didn't think I was being abducted by aliens, but it has a lot of similarities and I think someone could easily experience something like it and think they were being abducted.

When I was about 12 I was on a school trip in France. I'd gone to bed, and woke up in the middle of the night totally unable to move. Standing over me was the after image of a figure wielding a knife. By after image, I mean it was like I'd just been looking at a really bright white light in that shape. It was a purple humanoid splotch that came back when I blinked. For eyes there were just big black holes. I was terrified of it, I knew that it had every intention of doing something with that knife. I was terrified even though it wasn't there any more and it was just the image.

At that point you could have interpreted it as an alien abduction experience. I thought at the time it was a man though, although there wasn't anything about it that indicated that.

After a few seconds I was finally able to move, and at about the same time I stopped being scared. I figured out it was a hallucination. If it'd been in the room and been that bright it'd have woken up the other people in that room. In addition I was on the top bunk of a bunk bed, my head about two feet from the ceiling. Standing over me the way the figure was, it would not only have to be floating in mid-air but its legs would have intersected the ceiling and the majority of its body would have been busy scaring the crap out of the people in the room above - who were still sound asleep.

I shrugged it off, and after the adrenaline wore off I went back to sleep. I've not infrequently had episodes of sleep paralysis since then - that was the first I remember having, but they don't bother me.
posted by edd at 4:35 PM on January 22, 2007 [1 favorite]

You'll want to take a look at Budd Hopkins' book "Missing Time".
posted by dbiedny at 5:18 PM on January 22, 2007

John Mack's Abduction. Harvard psychiatrist who led a support group at Cambridge Hospital for people who claimed to have been abducted. Pulitzer Prize winner.
posted by madstop1 at 5:41 PM on January 22, 2007

edd, you took my answer :)

but here's a wikipedia link on sleep paralysisfor synecdoche if he/she wishes to pursue that angle.

My narrative is identical to edd's, except replace 'aliens' with 'men in black (the creepy kind, not Will Smith)'. Note that in days of yore, instead of aliens or men in black, they worried about Succubi instead.

Hope this isn't considered a derail/offtopic (i.e. I'm not trying to 'debunk' aliens. I make no comment on that), but maybe it can be helpful depending on the point of view of the paper.
posted by johnstein at 5:42 PM on January 22, 2007

Professional skeptic hottie Michael Shermer relates his "alien abduction experience" in his book Why People Believe Weird Things (scroll down). The book also examines generally why people think that they have been abducted, and why other people believe the stories, in a respectful but intellectually rigorous way.
posted by Methylviolet at 5:45 PM on January 22, 2007

John Mack's Abduction. Harvard psychiatrist who led a support group at Cambridge Hospital for people who claimed to have been abducted. Pulitzer Prize winner.

Dont let his credentials fool you. I met John Mack and he clearly came across as more than a bit wacko. The context was a seminar in which it was him, his lovely assistant, me, and four other people.

He had recently returned from South Africa and was showing us films he had taken of abductees there recounting their experiences into the camera. It was pretty clear to me that the witnesses were all complete liars. They had shifty eyes, deceptive gestures and overall made me feel like the type of folks that were trying to sell me a used car. There was a second set of witnesses too - they were all very young children. Their tales were outlandish and well, they were children.

The "testimony" was so comically bad that after the screening, those of us in attendance didnt know what to say. But it was clear that Mack bought into it wholesale. He showed not one shred of any investigative spirit.
posted by vacapinta at 6:15 PM on January 22, 2007

Thanks, all. The veracity of their claims is less important to me than the genre-- this is for a cultural studies class and I'm going to analyze the abduction narratives as a form of captivity narrative (following some secondary research I have done) focusing specifically on missing time and removal from a particular temporality. (At least, that is what I have so far.)
posted by synecdoche at 9:50 PM on January 22, 2007

Whitley Streiber's Communion is a classic. It's here on WorldCat and here on Amazon.
posted by bokinney at 7:47 AM on January 23, 2007

I read this book quite a while ago and, if I recall correctly, it was interesting.
posted by deborah at 7:30 PM on January 23, 2007