The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions

The very sound science on memory and its fallibility I discussed in the previous post is, as I argued, particularly relevant to the question of close encounters … and not, as most psychologists would hold, simply to cast doubt on their objective reality. I think that it is precisely the kind of memory research that thus far has mainly been used to discredit abductions that might also lead to some fascinating new hypotheses actually consistent with the reality of such experiences.

I suggested a while back that the range of bewildering experiences reported by contactees is surprisingly, even uncannily, consistent with the range of experiences that can be produced by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Pairs of rapidly alternating electromagnets applied to the scalp can generate weak electrical impulses in the brain that, depending on where they are applied, may produce not only sleep paralysis-type effects (paralysis and intense fear) but also distorted time, hallucinated voices that would be experienced as telepathy, light effects, a sense of religious communion, enhanced cognition or creativity, and physical sensations such as levitation.

We can’t say with any certainty what UFOs are, but there is now no doubt that some are real, that they are technological, and that they interact with humans. There is no doubt that “contact” (in some sense) occurs. As long as we accept this, we need only invoke Occam’s Razor. The most parsimonious general explanation for bewildering contact or abduction experiences is neither “they are real” nor “they are confabulated” (as Susan Clancy for example argues) but a fascinating combination of the two: They represent an interaction between a real physical encounter and some form of electromagnetic cortical stimulation that radically distorts’ contactees’ perceptions. The stimulation could be deliberately applied or it could be incidental, or both.

Were the typical abduction experience limited to bedroom visitation, then Clancy’s argument that abduction memories are just elaborated constructions based on an episode of sleep paralysis—spontaneous hiccups in sleeping/waking—would hold more weight (and I’m willing to accept that that this explanation does apply in some or even many cases—perhaps all the ones she examines in her book). By extension, if abduction experiences consisted solely of hearing voices and commands, then it would be easier to simply attribute them to paranoid schizophrenia. If they consisted solely of religious raptures and communion type experiences, we could explain them readily as temporal lobe epilepsy. Yet such experiences typically seem to involve a combination of these things, and I am not aware of any common type of disordered thinking/perception that involves all of these experiences and occurs in otherwise healthy individuals in the context of seeing or being approached by a strange aerial vehicle (sometimes verified by other witnesses).

This high overlap strongly suggests to me that many abduction cases do represent a close or intimate encounter with someone or something real, but that the experienced “reality” consists of perceptions and thoughts and images recruited from within the abductee’s brain, not what objectively occurred. TMS seems like the best explanation—and one that would hold whether UFOs were extraterrestrial or terrestrial in origin.

TMS effects could first of all (sometimes, at least) be incidental to a close encounter. All evidence points to UFOs using some sort of electrogravitic propulsion; they appear to generate powerful magnetic fields in their vicinity. Simple proximity to UFOs commonly causes electrical systems in automobiles, planes, and radios to go haywire or simply fail. The same thing might happen to the electrical systems in contactees’ brains through simple proximity to such an object. For an analogy, think of Roy Neary’s crazily haywire truck dashboard when he has his first run-in with a UFO in Close Encounters—all the spinning dials, radio turning on, etc. This is like what happens with TMS. This is your brain on UFOs.

Or TMS effects could be deliberately applied. Use of paralyzing and mind-altering technology is a common theme in close-encounter reports. As certain military encounters suggest, UFOs themselves can deliberately disable airplane or missile-launch systems, so some sort of remote targeted electromagnetic scrambling of witnesses’ brains is certainly plausible. UFO-nauts themselves are frequently described to use hand-held devices (such as the often-reported “flashlights”) to paralyze people. It certainly would make sense that something like TMS would be an effective tool to control and confuse a person without causing bodily harm or leaving a physical trace (as a drug would).

TMS technology is already widely used in psychology laboratories and is even being developed for use in by the military, so it is also certainly within the capability of secret groups in the military or intelligence utilizing the UFO mystery for its own purposes (such as those explored by Mark Pilkington in his recent book Mirage Men).

Memory is unreliable and subject to distortion even under the best of circumstances. Often two witnesses will report different colors or models of car in a hit and run, or give completely different descriptions of an assailant, and it is easy to generate false memories even without the help of magnetic fields or drugs. If something like TMS is involved, there may be little or no “there there” to contactees’ memories, and certainly nothing recoverable through hypnosis or any sort of therapeutic “regression.” It would be as unlikely as describing objectively what happened during an LSD trip or drunken bar crawl—there’s no objective sober perceiver in the brain alongside the impaired one, nothing to record the experience as it ‘really’ happened. This black-box nature of the phenomenon would open a big door to the kinds of cultural construction and post-facto sense-making using cultural archetypes that abduction’s critics like Clancy quite reasonably point to. Not to mention the forms of deception and social control Vallee warns of.

Whatever the case, the term “contactees” seems to represent a misplaced optimism on the part of those studying the phenomenon. Contact implies communication or sharing. But that hardly seems the character of most accounts. Misdirection, confusion, and exploitation seem to be the main themes. Whether achieved through TMS or something else, the remembered experiences of contactees are more likely compelling images and sensations and archetypes recruited from within their own brain, with the contactee as thus an unwitting participant in the deception. It is the opposite of communication. As long as we take the contact “image” literally and don’t do our best to peer behind the curtain (or break into the projection room, in Vallee’s metaphor), we are falling victim to that deception.

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