jmercury's review
3.0
As silly as it sounds, I find stories of aliens and of alien abductions to be terrifying. There's something about the ideas of home invasion - alien entities and alien intentions - amnesia - and helplessness in these accounts which make my skin crawl. I've felt this way since childhood, when I would warily peek into UFO books at the library and suffer nightmares for days afterward. I'm not sure what came over me, but I decided to read this classic of the abduction phenomena chronicles as an adult to make up my own mind.
The accounts are chilling and strange. Bright and blinding lights, frozen compatriots, missing time, men without identities, and encounters in the woods feature in a chronology of anxiety and fear. I couldn't read this book alone or at night at first.
As I read more, however, I noticed some problems with the assumption of the reality of these experiences.
One problem is the heavy reliance on hypnotic regression to recall memories. While Hopkins is transparent in how he does or does not use leading questions, and attempts to minimize their impact on the testimonies he collects, one can't help but look back over the forty years since this publication and how far hypnosis has fallen from favor in the psychiatric and forensic sciences. Are these accounts trustworthy at all? Or are they entirely fabricated memories which just *feel real* to these waking dreamers?
Another problem is that many of the reports follow a classic progression of sleep paralysis hallucinations. Sleep paralysis is a common and harmless, though terrifying, phenomena where a dreamer awakes enough to be conscious, but not enough to rouse the body from the inhibition of motion normal during sleep. The result is a feeling of paralysis and terror, almost always accompanied by auditory, tactile, and visual hallucinations projected onto one's surroundings. I've personally experienced sleep paralysis and it was extremely frightening, but I accept that it is a physical process. A recurring motif in this book is an abductee waking from sleep in their room to find figures watching them, speaking to them, and guiding them elsewhere. Seeing figures in one's room is a common experience of sleep paralysis, and it's easy to imagine that the dreamer fell back into REM sleep and transitioned to a vivid dream state.
This motif becomes more damning when one learns that sleep paralysis is often comorbid with narcolepsy, a condition in which one experiences a disrupted sleep cycle. Unplanned and unexpected naps caused by undiagnosed narcolepsy could account for "missing time" incidents. Sufferers of narcolepsy may also experience hypnagogic hallucinations, which are vivid hallucinations experienced when drowsy - much like one abductee's account of watching television late at night and seeing an alien walk across her hallway. It's much easier to believe that she experienced a hypnagogic hallucination while nodding off than that she was visited by an alien grabbing a drink down the hall.
Finally, sleep paralysis and nacrolepsy may run in families, which would help to explain why familial groups tend to experience abductions.
While I believe that many abductees believe they have experienced an abduction, and suffer side effects and psychological effects, reading this book with curiosity and a critical outlook helped reduce my fear around alien abductions. It's still a frightening and compelling narrative, but I took Budd's advice from the introductory chapter and decided for myself.
The accounts are chilling and strange. Bright and blinding lights, frozen compatriots, missing time, men without identities, and encounters in the woods feature in a chronology of anxiety and fear. I couldn't read this book alone or at night at first.
As I read more, however, I noticed some problems with the assumption of the reality of these experiences.
One problem is the heavy reliance on hypnotic regression to recall memories. While Hopkins is transparent in how he does or does not use leading questions, and attempts to minimize their impact on the testimonies he collects, one can't help but look back over the forty years since this publication and how far hypnosis has fallen from favor in the psychiatric and forensic sciences. Are these accounts trustworthy at all? Or are they entirely fabricated memories which just *feel real* to these waking dreamers?
Another problem is that many of the reports follow a classic progression of sleep paralysis hallucinations. Sleep paralysis is a common and harmless, though terrifying, phenomena where a dreamer awakes enough to be conscious, but not enough to rouse the body from the inhibition of motion normal during sleep. The result is a feeling of paralysis and terror, almost always accompanied by auditory, tactile, and visual hallucinations projected onto one's surroundings. I've personally experienced sleep paralysis and it was extremely frightening, but I accept that it is a physical process. A recurring motif in this book is an abductee waking from sleep in their room to find figures watching them, speaking to them, and guiding them elsewhere. Seeing figures in one's room is a common experience of sleep paralysis, and it's easy to imagine that the dreamer fell back into REM sleep and transitioned to a vivid dream state.
This motif becomes more damning when one learns that sleep paralysis is often comorbid with narcolepsy, a condition in which one experiences a disrupted sleep cycle. Unplanned and unexpected naps caused by undiagnosed narcolepsy could account for "missing time" incidents. Sufferers of narcolepsy may also experience hypnagogic hallucinations, which are vivid hallucinations experienced when drowsy - much like one abductee's account of watching television late at night and seeing an alien walk across her hallway. It's much easier to believe that she experienced a hypnagogic hallucination while nodding off than that she was visited by an alien grabbing a drink down the hall.
Finally, sleep paralysis and nacrolepsy may run in families, which would help to explain why familial groups tend to experience abductions.
While I believe that many abductees believe they have experienced an abduction, and suffer side effects and psychological effects, reading this book with curiosity and a critical outlook helped reduce my fear around alien abductions. It's still a frightening and compelling narrative, but I took Budd's advice from the introductory chapter and decided for myself.
cdbnovelist's review
4.0
Well, there was a time in the 70s and 80s where some of us saw things up in the skies above. 40 years later, they are still Unidentified Flying Objects. Bud Hopkins wrote a wonderful book. A film came out too in two parts. If you're curious on how we saw them and what we thought of back then. This is a great pick!
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