Alien Abductions: Creating a Modern Phenomenon - Review

By Terry Matheson. Prometheus Books, Amherst, N.Y. 1998. ISBN 1-57392-244-7. 317 pp. Hardcover, $26.95.

Few long-time readers of this journal will argue that most reports of UFOs and related matters - abductions, cattle mutilations, crop circles, and so on - don't soon give way to prosaic explanations. And the few reports that don't turn up prosaic explanations tend to be inconclusive at best, hardly offering the "hard proof" that should be necessary before we believe in ongoing alien visitations. Clearly, since the first modern UFO sighting was in 1947, one would expect some sort of undeniable proof by now if there were real alien visitations going on. Yet despite this lack of hard evidence, the entire field of UFO beliefs shows no signs of going away. In fact, the claims are actually getting broader in scope. What's going on?

For some time now, I've been telling people that what we are seeing with the UFO phenomenon is not something real, as in spaceships visiting Earth, but something equally interesting, perhaps the development of a modern mythology. Yet, paradoxically, few skeptics seem to have shown much interest in writing about this aspect of the UFO phenomenon (or should I say "non-phenomenon"?) - until now. And that's why I like this book.

Terry Matheson is an English literature professor at the University of Saskatchewan, a man whose professional expertise lies in analyzing texts and literature. He's written this book specifically analyzing that curious subgenre of modern literature, mass audience, popular UFO abduction reports. Some readers will question this premise. Are these texts really literature? They are, after all, generally placed in the nonfiction section, and the authors do claim to be describing real events.

For this reason, early on in the work, Matheson describes the case of Antonio Villa-Boas, an early abduction report from Brazil. He analyzes the way the event has been described by five different UFO authors, cataloguing which facts the authors chose to include and which they deemed unimportant and noting several discernible differences in selection and emphasis. It's a simple but convincing demonstration of his basic premise. When an author describes an event, he also interprets it and selects which elements to emphasize and include. This unavoidable process is perhaps especially important when describing far-fetched events such as UFO abduction reports.

It should be pointed out that, outside of analyzing these texts, Matheson makes no attempt to get at the underlying facts of the case, and for this reason it's quite likely that some skeptics may find themselves lost when they search for the systematic debunking they've come to expect in skeptics' books. On the other hand, many readers, myself included, will simply acknowledge that we've seen UFO abduction reports debunked and explained elsewhere. Matheson is not claiming such reports are true nor dismissing the issue of truth or falsehood. After all, how could a mythology develop if the events were completely true? Instead he is moving beyond the issue of veracity to describe the meaning and the evolution of the claimed phenomenon.

For this reason, this work is probably not the best introduction to skeptical UFOlogy. On the other hand it does make many new contributions to the way skeptics can look at these claims. For instance, few people took George Adamski's reports of being a UFO contactee seriously, but many took John Fuller's reports of Betty and Barney Hill's abduction story quite seriously indeed. Why? To Matheson this is quite an important issue. How does an author take an unlikely event like a UFO abduction claim and make it convincing? Matheson carefully selects and discusses the techniques each author uses. He also discusses which techniques failed and which worked.

Skeptics who have closely examined the history and variety of UFO abduction reports soon realize that the popular claim of commonality that all abductees reported common events is false. In fact there is great variety and difference in the details of such reports, and they most certainly have changed over the years. But how exactly do the reports differ? Which elements of these stories cropped up in which reports? Which of these elements were then repeated by other abductees and which were discarded, never to be heard or seen again?

Matheson has done all skeptics a great service by carefully analyzing this element of the abduction literature, and I expect to be consulting his work for this very reason over the next several years. He is also quite good at finding internal inconsistencies in the text and discussing how the author has dealt with these (either through denial, offering some sort of attempted explanation or simply through attempting to edit the facts to hide the problem). Among the works analyzed are those of Budd Hopkins, John Fuller, Whitley Streiber, David Jacobs, and John Mack.

The book does have flaws. There are places where Matheson seems to wonder why the authors of the UFO texts do not engage in the sorts of analyses common to literary analysis, which he feels are appropriate for interpreting not just literature but actual events. For instance, at one point he wishes that UFO text authors would spend more time discussing Jungian archetypes. Personally I was quite bothered by many points where Matheson attempted to discuss hypnosis - a near-universal "tool" to uncover UFO memories. Although Matheson understands that leading questioning during hypnosis can easily create false memories and produce confabulation, he seems to believe that some UFO abduction reports can be "screen memories" of repressed sexual abuse reports. He should know that there is no scientific evidence that memories of long-term abuse can be repressed, recovered, or manifest themselves as "screen memories."