A study of fantasy proneness in the thirteen cases of alleged encounters in John Mack's 'Abduction'

Since Robert A. Baker's pioneering article appeared in the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER (Baker 1987-1988), a controversy has raged over his suggestion that self-proclaimed "alien abductees" exhibited an array of unusual traits that indicated they had fantasy-prone personalities. Baker cited the "important but much neglected" work of Wilson and Barber (1983), who listed certain identifying characteristics of people who fantasize profoundly. Baker applied Wilson and Barber's findings to the alien-abduction phenomenon and found a strong correlation. Baker explained how a cursory examination by a psychologist or psychiatrist might find an "abductee" to be perfectly normal, while more detailed knowledge about the person's background and habits would reveal to such a trained observer a pattern of fantasy proneness.

For example, Baker found Whitley Strieber - author of Communion, which tells the "true story" of Strieber's own alleged abduction - to be "a classic example of the [fantasy-prone personality] genre." Baker noted that Strieber exhibited such symptoms as being easily hypnotized, having vivid memories, and experiencing hypnopompic hallucinations (i.e. "waking dreams"), as well as being "a writer of occult and highly imaginative novels" and exhibiting other characteristics of fantasy proneness. A subsequent, but apparently independent, study by Bartholomew and Basterfield (1988) drew similar conclusions.

Wilson and Barber's study did not deal with the abduction phenomenon (which at the time consisted of only a handful of reported cases), and some of their criteria seem less applicable to abduction cases than to other types of reported phenomena, such as psychic experiences. Nevertheless, although the criteria for fantasy proneness have not been exactly codified, they generally include such features as having a rich fantasy life, showing high hypnotic susceptibility, claiming psychic abilities and healing powers, reporting out-of-body experiences and vivid or "waking" dreams, having apparitional experiences and religious visions, and exhibiting automatic writing. In one study, Bartholomew, Basterfield, and Howard (1991) found that, of 152 otherwise normal, functional individuals who reported they had been abducted or had persistent contacts with extraterrestrials, 132 had one or more major characteristics of fantasy-prone personality.

Somewhat equivocal results were obtained by Spanos et al. (1993), although their "findings suggest that intense UFO experiences are more likely to occur in individuals who are predisposed toward esoteric beliefs in general and alien beliefs in particular and who interpret unusual sensory and imagined experiences in terms of the alien hypothesis. Among UFO believers, those with stronger propensities toward fantasy production were particularly likely to generate such experiences" (Spanos et al. 1993, p. 631).

A totally dismissive view of these attempts to find conventional psychological explanations for the abduction experience is found in the introduction to psychiatrist John Mack's Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994). Mack states unequivocally: "The effort to discover a personality type associated with abductions has also not been successful." According to Mack, since some alleged abductions have reportedly taken place in infancy or early childhood, "Cause and effect in the relationship of abduction experiences to building of personality are thus virtually impossible to sort out" (Mack 1994, p. 5). But surely it is Mack's burden to prove his own thesis that the alien hypothesis does have a basis in fact beyond mere allegation. Otherwise the evidence may well be explained by a simpler hypothesis, such as the possibility that most "abductees" are fantasy-prone personality types. (Such people have traits that cut across many different personality dimensions; thus conventional personality tests are useless for identifying easily hypnotizable people. Some "abductees" who are not fantasy prone may be hoaxers, for example, or exhibit other distinctive personality traits or psychological problems.) Mack's approach to the diagnosis and treatment of his "abductee" patients has been criticized by many of his colleagues (e.g., Cone 1994).

Methodology

To test the fantasy-proneness hypothesis, I carefully reviewed the thirteen chapter-length cases in Mack's Abduction (Chapters 3-15), selected from the forty-nine patients he most carefully studied out of seventy-six "abductees." Since his presentation was not intended to include fantasy proneness, certain potential indicators of that personality type - like a subject's having an imaginary playmate - would not be expected to be present. Nevertheless, Mack's rendering of each personality in light of the person's alleged abduction experiences was sufficiently detailed to allow the extraction of data pertaining to several indicators of fantasy proneness. They are the following: