Abduction Reality

Peter Brookesmith. Alien Abductions. Blandford, 1998.
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Peter Brookesmith 's latest book is one of the very few studies of abductions which can be wholehearted recommended, a marvellously sane, caring study, which while rebutting the claims of the ET merchants, warns us not to dismiss the abduction myth as a 'nothing but'. This is a psychosocial orientated study which cannot be written off as the work of an armchair ufologist, for anyone less of an armchair ufologist it would be harder to find than Brookesmith. He has toured much of the United States and has interviewed abductees and researchers both there and here in Britain, and presents their stories. I doubt if anyone has talked with Betty Hill, for example, in such depth in a good many years. What is clear. is that he listened to these stories in a way that few of the ET promoters have. He is particularly scathing with David Jacobs who, he argues, follows the profoundly unscientific principle that no one should undertake any research unless its results are known beforehand. Presenting narratives without this prior distortion gives some impression as to their diversity. Even where there are superficial similarities, there often great differences.

Brookesmith suggests areas of potential explanation, the most fruitful being that of sleep disorders and other altered states. perhaps in some cases triggered by environmental impulses. Of particular interest is his account of the narcoleptic David Howard - narcolepsy being a neurological disorder in which the sufferer spontaneously goes into dreaming sleep from wakefulness, often during the day. Dreams are intensely vivid and realistic, there are episodes of aware sleep paralysis, daytime paralysis, and periods of 'absence' and missing time. Howard at one point dreamed so frequently and so clearly that it seemed he was living parallel lives, here on earth and in the battlefields of an alien planet of the imagination.

This absorption in an alien world is reminiscent of the story of Kirk Allen as studied by the psychiatrist Robert Lindner, who constructed a fantasy life in a science fiction future, and filled thousands of pages of manuscript with his 'biography'. Allen may have been an undiagnosed narcoleptic. but his narratives also evoke Caraboo syndrome. Howard's narratives also have echoes of Caraboo syndrome, and for some people narcolepsy may be opening into enhanced realms of creativity.

It is, however, not so much mechanism as meaning that interests Brookesmith, and as readers of Magonia are aware he sees the abduction myth as above all an example of the religious imagination in a modern world. This is a post modem religion, a child of the solipsistic age of the therapist. When Brookesmith allows the abductees the right of reply to his psychosocial interpretations, they come out with quotes such as 'l feel that in your commentary on mythology you are on a valid path, but would argue that what constitutes reality for one is not the same flavour to another”, or “I would have no patience for anyone who would disbelieve or dissuade me from my own truths ... To me facts arc arbitrary by definition, being true for one person and his experiences and yet, just as not true for other people in the same time and circumstances”.

In this post modem age truth and reality can be pick'n'mixed, off-the-shelf truths and a la carte reality. There is no central reality or vision that communities can agree on. There is perhaps one doubt, and that is whether even such a sane and balanced account of the abduction experience as this, simply by being published in a 'popular' format and marketed does not help spread the abduction myth, an argument recently advanced by Kevin McClure. On the other hand, abduction books will not go away and if sensible books like this are not produced then the field will be left clear for the exploiters. I am not sure how we get out of this dilemma. – Peter Rogerson. Magonia 73, January 2001.