Alien Abductions and Encounters
A Mental Model to Get Started
Dear Reader,
There are a number of ways I could introduce the topic of alien abductions to you. I could try to explain why this is a worthwhile area of research, with massive implications on our understanding of science and human history. Or I could show you how it has profound significance for the world you will live in, in the future. I could equally scold the skeptics and academics who have treated the topic superficially or attempted to dissect it only under the banner of their field of expertise.
Yet, I don’t think any of those approaches are going to be very effective - at least not as a starting point. Rather, I am compelled to write this for those of you curious enough to play along and humor the far-fetched and impossible prospect that aliens exist, and that they are abducting and interacting with humans.
The wise and attentive reader might use this Substack as a ladder to climb into the topic, and pursue original research on these entities and their intentions. But my assumption is that most of you are simply looking for a starting point from the very beginning - an orientation of sorts on what people mean when they say ‘alien abduction’ or ‘experiencer’. You want to sift through the far-fetched ‘woo,’ the ‘galactic federation’ jargon, the ‘greys vs. the nordics vs. the reptilians,’ ‘They are here to steal our souls,’ ‘They are here to save us when a cataclysm hits,’ ‘It’s all love and light,’ etc.
I am sure you have heard snippets of some versions of these narratives. You probably already have an opinion about what is ‘correct’ and what is ‘off-the-mark’.
If you are so inclined to indulge me, and put aside your existing assumptions and judgements, I can offer you a front-row seat in exploring the boring, tedious, and expansive data on this topic such that you will probably not have any better an idea of what is actually happening, but at least you will understand why certain people believe certain things. This is a sportive expedition that is best explored as a ‘game’ without serious emotional investment (at least at the beginning).
How does that sound? Consider yourself pre-warned. I am not here to push any single theory, or critique any specific author. I am here to simply show you how expansive this topic truly is, and offer some recommendations on how to best explore this new frontier. I think, deep down, a part of me is looking for serious conversation partners who enjoy dialogue and mental gymnastic routines on the abduction data. Perhaps that is you!
Where Do We Begin? How to Research Alien Abductions
When I’m having a conversation with someone about this topic, I like to start by referencing the original conversation between Harvard psychiatrist Dr. John Mack and renowned philosopher of science Dr. Thomas Kuhn.
They knew each other for most of their lives, and when Dr. John Mack began to investigate supposed ‘alien encounters’ in the early 1990s, he went to Thomas Kuhn and asked him how to best explore this new frontier. Thomas Kuhn’s answer: To collect as much data as possible, and put data ‘on the table’ before jumping to any pre-conceived conclusions about what that data might mean.
The reason why he recommended doing this is the subject of his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It’s an enjoyable read that provides a compelling picture into how horribly wrong humans have repeatedly been over the last 2,000 years as they ‘fail forward’ in discovering more about the world.
Dr. John Mack’s key takeaway from all of this was what he termed temporal provincialism. It’s the term I think everyone who wants to research alien abductions needs to understand before getting started.
Temporal provincialism states that just because something is deemed ‘impossible’ today, or ‘hard to imagine’ because of our current method of reasoning, the historical record suggests that there are many reasons why it might be possible or logical - we just haven’t matured sufficiently to understand those reasons.
Temporal provincialism, protects us against our ability to impose our ideas and understandings onto raw data or actions, above or beyond what is actually in the data.
Usually, the common mistake goes something like this:
Example 1: An encounter witness reports a craft landing and an entity that emerges to collect a sample of grass from the ground before climbing back into the craft and flying off.
The Temporally Provincial Perspective: ‘The beings came to collect a sample of grass - But why on earth would such an advanced, interstellar species, travel all the way to this earth to simply collect a sample?! Therefore, this cannot be what actually happened, and there must have been another reason for why they wished to portray to us, the act of collecting a sample. This is because my temporally provincial idea suggests the original reason doesn’t make any sense.’
As you can see in this example, an action (collecting a sample of grass) is speculated on, with a pre-existing idea (that and advanced interstellar spacefaring species wouldn't travel so far, just to collect a sample - because they would have to be so much more advanced!).
To avoid temporal provincialism, we would rather say, ‘it appears to us that the entities collected a sample of grass and disappeared back into their craft’. That’s clearly odd. But notice, we are not speculating beyond the simple fact of what was reported from the original witness!
The opposite of temporal provincialism (on the other end of the spectrum) is what is known as vital reason. This is a philosophical concept put forward by Jose Ortega y Gasset (a lesser known contemporary of Martin Heidegger), who argued that the way we make sense of the world is historically conditioned, and that we cannot help but see the world a certain way. In other words, a car has to be a car for you, because you were born in 1980, whereas, a car for an indigenous Inca in 1520 would have to be understood much differently.
For our purposes, all you need to accept is that when we delve into a specific encounter or experience, we are not going to question their foundational experience unless there is an equally compelling reason given in the data.
Let me give you an example:
Example 2: A witness saw a triangle shaped craft the size of a football field slowly move over their house, blocking out the night sky.
We could, hyper-rationally, attempt to say that this craft is a projection, a form of their imagination, a facet of the collective unconscious - and so forth. But all of those explanations would be imposing existing theories on the raw data. The raw data from the witness, simply says that they saw a football field sized craft that slowly moved over the house. Nothing more - and nothing less!
Until we get more information on what happened, for example, if they shot a gun at the craft and the bullet deflected off, or if the craft landed and left a mark on the ground, or if another person saw the same craft - we are not in a position to rationally over-reach and simply must take the statement from the witness at face value: a triangle shaped craft the size of a football field, flew over the house.
Very often in this literature the witness will have an experience where they themselves grapple with the reality of their experience. Those sharing their experiences are quite good at saying that they had a dream, or a very realistic or vivid dream, or had full conscious recall of an experience, or a fragment of a memory, or a virtual reality-like experience. Our job as researchers is to put data on the table - nothing more and nothing less!
So we take what the witness said, and record it as the witness presented it, such that we can line it up against other testimonies over time, to get a clearer picture of what might be happening. In philosophy this would be the most reliable approach for approximating the truth of the matter.
All of this is a longwinded way of saying, we research these experiences by:
Not dismissing or over-rationalizing anything shared about the experience itself - as it is reported.
We take at face-value the presented experience, filing it away, and reserving judgement until more data can be collected.
Temporal provincialism is what you want to try to avoid (“Just because I think this is far-fetched, doesn’t mean it has to be dismissed”).
And, vital reason is what you cannot avoid (“The world and my understanding of it, presents itself to me in a particular way, for the time, generation, and reality I inhabit”).
Raw Source Material for Alien Abductions and Encounters: The Epistemological Framework
With these two tools in hand, I can now introduce to you, the sources of raw data that other academics and researchers have used, to discover or learn about this topic over the past 80 years.
Individual Testimony from Lived Experience: A person writes down or records their experience. This experience is often sent in the form of a letter to a researcher, or turned into a book that is published.
Hypnotic Regression Testimony: In an altered mindstate, testimony is accessed from deeper or inaccessible memories in a person's mind.
Group Consensus from Lived Experience: Multiple people corroborate facets of an experience.
Chemical or Biological Specimens: Objects obtained from or during an event are analyzed for biological or chemical markers.
I think the easiest way to understand these sources of data, is through a historical example:
When the Panda was first discovered in Western Europe, it was dismissed for the first 30 years as a hoax (1896 to 1927).
The discovery began through the testimony of a single person based on their personal experience of seeing or interacting with a panda (and of course, in very human fashion, that testimony was ridiculed as a hoax.) Over time, as more people visited China and returned to Europe, more and more people testified to the reality of the Panda bear. Then, finally, a Panda bear was captured, taken to Europe, and scientifically studied, from which it was confirmed that the Panda bear, biologically, was a distinct specimen of bear.
From the initial testimony about ‘the panda’, to the ‘scientific verification’ that ‘pandas exist’ it took almost 30 years! Now suppose, instead of first discovering a Panda, the first person instead encountered an animal that was more advanced than a human itself. What kind of a timeline would that process of discovery go on?
And this is exactly why we play this game of sources when looking at alien abductions and encounters. It’s not that ‘we know’ what is happening. It’s that we are willing to take the intellectual bet, that based on thousands and thousands of testimonies separated by geography and time, there are common details from the original experience that deserve further investigation and inquiry - and will hopefully enlighten us towards some type of discovery.
‘All Things Being Equal’
Now, you might be thinking, how do we know if all of this isn’t some form of elaborate hoax? We don’t. But what we can say, is the following: Either, there is a new illness going around - that manifests through PTSD, trauma, and unexpected belief in aliens (features of an abduction we will explain later on) - or, the experiences that these people are sharing with the world, hold some degree of truthfulness to them! The only way we will know if it is an illness, a hallucination, or reality itself - is by lining up all of the testimonies and attempting to piece together the shared experiences of what is happening.
This brings me to one of the most important tools I use to evaluate encounters and experiences from this literature. It’s known intellectually through the phrase: All Things Being Equal.
Here is how it goes:
Person A is a financial analyst with a good reputation and a happy professional and personal life for the past 20 years. Person A begins to believe that they are being visited by aliens based on a number of symptoms and experiences. Person A is verified by a psychiatrist as being sane, but is diagnosed as suffering from PTSD, trauma, and physical scars associated with these mysterious encounters. Person A continues to believe they are being visited by aliens for the next 10 years.
All things being equal, and without any additional information, we would not have any data to suggest that Person A is behaving in an unreliable manner. (We could look for a hoax, but until we found evidence and a reason for Person A faking a traumatic experience, we would not have any data to suggest that this was a hoax). Rather, just as we would listen to and accept Person A if he came up with a new perspective on a financial market, or if he complained about a new health ailment they were experiencing (like a stomach ache), we would equally accept Person A’s perspective on what is happening to them even if they believe that what is happening to them is an experience with alien beings. Their testimony would only strengthen if Person A re-iterated for the next 10 years, that these experiences continued to happen.
In other words, we are looking for consistency and reliability from the person sharing their experience. And we are also looking for conflicts of interest or any other explanation for their behavior. As you will come to see, there is a somewhat strong thesis in this literature that many (not all) of these experiences are actually the result of military black projects!
If we don’t find any conflicts of interest, and we see the person to be reliable and consistent in their testimony, then all things being equal we accept their testimony until further data or evidence suggests that we should not.
The important nuance here is that there is a severe tendency in this topic to jump-the-gun, and determine a person’s credibility based on the nature of what they claim to have experienced. Often, if someone claims something that seems to us to be so outlandish and absurd we naturally dismiss them (hence the flaw of temporal provincialism).
What I am suggesting to you, is that the rules of this game are actually on a more difficult level: As you dive into this topic, you are not allowed to dismiss anyone unless:
You have supporting data suggesting the person is truly unstable, attempting a hoax, or clinically insane, or
You have supporting evidence that directly contradicts the testimony of the person.
Some of you would probably have been part of the crowd ridiculing the first person to swear to the existence of the panda. My goal here is to encourage all of us to not make the same mistake again.
Speed Running Your Preparation Into This Topic: The Past Work Already Done
One of my greatest fears for this topic is that it will suffer from historical amnesia. In other words, people will start to research alien encounters and abductions today, as if they are the first people to ever do so. You aren’t…. We aren’t.
In fact there is a very rich tradition of research into alien abductions and experiences, going back to the 1960s and 1970s. My goal in closing out this introductory essay is to help you orient yourself in what has been done in the past 80 years.
I’m sure some of you have heard of Betty and Barney Hill, or Travis Walton, or maybe even the Pascagoula Abductions. These are the familiar ‘alien encounters’ that filled much pop-culture in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s through the present day. But behind these individuals, were entire research organizations committed to investigating abduction experiences and alien encounters.
Here are a couple of those traditions:
Dr. Leo Sprinkle was a psychiatrist at the University of Wyoming who worked with abductees and experiencers. The chart below is from his Archive, at the Wyoming Heritage Center - he worked with 148 people from 1967 to 1983 (and many more beyond 1983).
Jim and Coral Lorenzen, ran the Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization (APRO) which began in 1952 and did a number of investigations into early encounters and abductions. APRO was the basis for the creation of MUFON - a well known research organization still alive and well today.
Raymond Fowler, spent over 10 years researching the Andreasson Affair, which turned into a multi-book saga, of the Andreasson Affair Parts I, II, The Watchers Parts I, II, and the Andreasson Legacy. He then went to work on the Alagash Abductions.
Jacques Vallee, probably one of the most well known researchers of the topic, has put forward his own theories on the data specifically under the guise of the inter-dimensional hypothesis, the control system hypothesis, and to some degree the simulation hypothesis. He investigated many cases first-hand (in the field) included in his book Encounters and most recently Trinity. Vallee is also renowned for his historical research in comparing modern encounters with past testimony spanning thousands of years (Passport to Magonia, Wonders in the Sky).
Still in the early days, John Keel spent well over 20 years researching a variety of encounters including the notorious Men in Black, paranormal encounters, and Cryptids.
Entering the 1980s and the 1990s, there is an uptick in the who and how of abduction and encounters research:
Researchers such as Budd Hopkins, Dr. David Jacobs (Temple University), Dr. John Mack (Harvard University), Dolores Cannon, Edith Fiore, Barbara Bartholic, Barbara Lamb, Richard Boylan, and Yvonne Smith all utilized different versions of regression hypnosis with hundreds of people who had incomplete yet present memories that they suspected might involve an alien encounter.
Around the same time (late 1980s), Whitley Strieber wrote his book Communion detailing his own experiences (and subsequently receiving tens of thousands of letters from other people around the world sharing their own experiences).
Karla Turner shared the story of her family in Into the Fringe, from which she wrote about her friend Ted Rice experiences in Masquerade of Angels and then a case study of multiple women in her book Taken. None of her subjects underwent hypnotic regression.
In this vein, the 21st century has brought a number of new researchers into the field, many of whom investigated and documented cases without the use of hypnosis. This includes the four seminal books from Dr. Ardy Sixkiller Clarke who documented American Indian encounters, as well as the many books of Preston Dennett. Also since the advent of the 21st century, there have been a number of books published by experiencers and abductees themselves: David Huggins, Jim Sparks, Kim Carlsburg, Leah Haley, Linda Haley, Eve Longoren, Kathleen Marden, the list goes on and on.
When I write about ‘the data’ I am referring to the shared experiences, data points, and encounters from this literature listed above. It spans hundreds of books, thousands of letters, and continues to grow as more archives are discovered and more research is done on the topic!
So, What is This Substack Going to be About?
I have spent many years reading and logging my notes from every single known book on the alien abduction-experiencer phenomenon. This research included multiple visits to the Archives of the Impossible (home of the thousands of Strieber Letters, the Mack Letters, and soon to the Jacques Vallee archive) at Rice University. More recently I have started working with the team at the Archives of the Impossible and the John Mack Institute (JMI) on their seminal meta-study of archival data!
This Substack is my home to write whatever I want about this topic, and to begin to piece together all of the data I have collected, such that everyone else interested in the topic can get clear and reliable information surrounding the many different facets of this phenomenon. It is not affiliated with Rice University, the John Mack Institute, or the Archive of the Impossible. It is my own personal forum for sharing my thoughts on the topic. I will be doing deep dives, book reviews, and critiques of existing theories all with a spirit of constructive collaboration in hoping to better understand more about alien abductions and encounters.
I am sure you won’t agree with everything I think. But at least more data will be added to the table, and a new forum of dialogue can begin that will hopefully get more people interested in investigating and researching this new frontier!