Published: February 16, 2006 10:07 pm      

Aliens don’t eat chicken or other lower life forms

Sooner or later, I knew it was bound to happen. It’s nearly impossible to avoid the subject: UFOs and alien abductions.

Now, wait a minute, before you reach for the phone.

So what, maybe I did have a UFO experience while studying journalism at Marshall University. The truth is, so did a lot of undergraduates in the late 1960s.

Case in point: A number of psychic scenarios commonly were discussed in the old student union — aliens, UFOs, ghosts, hypnosis, the Lost Continent of Atlantis, Edgar Cayce, and an assortment of seemingly unexplainable “supernatural occurrences.”

It happened shortly after a Huntington UFO enthusiast and I traveled to Point Pleasant to scrutinize a family of subjects who confessed to having had visits from “alien men in black suits.” The family seemed normal enough. And though I didn’t believe in the reports, it was difficult to dismiss them out of hand.

Later that week, I dreamed about flying saucers and aliens. At least, I thought it was a dream. Only now, after years of reading American journalism, I’m not so sure.

In my dream, I talked to visitors from another galaxy via hand signals (the ring finger of the right hand, to be precise). “In the universe there are many life forms, and this is only one life form that we are going through at the moment,” a mysterious figure in a space suit told me. “But what we don’t understand about your planet is: The higher forms eat the lower forms.”

After that cosmic revelation, I shunned fried-chicken eateries for weeks.

And yet, if you are a dyed-in-the-wool UFO skeptic as I am, it is jarring to realize that prestigious universities allow conferences on similar topics to be held on their campuses regularly.

MIT, for instance, held a five-day conference devoted to the subject of alien abductions. In attendance were numerous psychologists, physicians, physicists, hypnotherapists, folklorists and even a few astronomers.

A great many of the audience consisted of abductees, those who claimed to have had a close encounter of the fourth kind, in which physical contact with an individual is initiated by occupants of alien spacecraft.

Preposterous! you say.

But look again. There are some intriguing psychological aspects to these reports. For one thing, although the details of the accounts vary, there are many singular commonalties reported by people who do not appear to be seeking their 15 minutes of fame, who do not know each other and who come from a wide variety of backgrounds in terms of education, social class and media exposure (which often gets blamed for these abduction stories).

And whether you believe in UFOs or not, reports of alien abductions are on the increase. In the U.S. alone, experts estimate that some 900,000 people believe they have been abducted by aliens.

My question is this: Why do so many people believe they are being abducted by aliens?

Interestingly enough, their reasons have nothing to do with seeking fame or attention, which is how many skeptics may explain these behaviors.

On the contrary, in the vast majority of cases, abductees do everything they can to avoid the public eye. Only when the symptoms of their suppressed abduction intrude on their lives do they seek help.

Even at the MIT conference, where they could have basked in the media limelight, name tags were inscribed only with first names.

Not surprisingly, though, the abduction episodes often are blamed on social and psychological pressures.

Others, meanwhile, unabashedly declare that abductees are only reporting what they experience, that indeed they are being abducted by alien beings.

What is the reason? No one really knows.

Some experts speculate that we may be witnessing the emergence of a new psychological disorder, or what college professors might tag as the “unknown social paradigm.”

This, or at least something similar, must be the force at work behind the alien abduction phenomenon. After all, society-wide psychological ailments such as “seasonal affective disorder” and “chronic fatigue syndrome” were not diagnosed until recently by psychotherapists. Perhaps “alien abduction disorder” falls into the same category.

But how would such a disorder evolve? It is in the nature of human beings to look for meaning and purpose in life: a satisfying career, true love, God.

Are some folk so removed from faith that they fantasize help coming from the skies in the form of aliens — aliens, I might add, that often behave sinisterly?

And yet, we are witnessing the voices of millions of tormented individuals who for some inexplicable reason share the alien abduction experience. “But what we don’t understand about your planet is: The higher forms eat the lower forms.” Could this be the manifestation of a collective guilt?

Whatever it is, the alien-UFO psychic experience is not so much about encounters with a race of extraterrestrials as it is about encounters with some unknown aspect of our own nature.

A quote from literature comes to mind: “Our faults lie not in our stars, dear Brutus, but in ourselves.”

Top o’ the morning!

— Blankenship is a Register-Herald writer.

E-mail:

jabbb@charter.net