Where is the physical evidence for alien abduction and why do people keep saying it exists?

The Secret Lurid History of Alien Abduction

This article presents the lurid secret history of alien abduction research. It is a literary analysis of many documents, which are described in the timeline below. This article is supported by research published in my books, particularly in the Prologue to _Field Guide to Anomalous Geometry.

There are a few things that need to be said about alien abduction research that have not been said before. These things involve a shameful history of great men losing their integrity in their pursuit of knowledge regarding the taboo subject of nonconsensual sex between humans and space aliens known as alien abduction. It took me several years of credulous research on alien abduction to discover what was obvious to many people: alien abduction research and its implied worldview are pseudo-science. I now argue it was and still is harmful (yes, even John Mack’s research).

If you’re like the majority of people, you may understand alien abduction to be a funny belief put forward in the 1990s by serious researchers like John Mack, Budd Hopkins, and David Jacobs. You might vaguely remember those men presenting their research like a clinical science based upon Mack’s credentials as a Harvard psychiatry professor. You might remember dramatized documentaries about their research and wonder how anyone can believe in such outlandish science fiction?

Maybe you recently got into the subject of UFOs, now called UAPs, because of the 2017 New York Times article about secret government money paid to Robert Bigelow to study UAPs and other paranormal phenomena at his Skinwalker Ranch. You may have heard about David Grusch, the UFO Whistleblower, who was introduced by the same authors of the NYT article, Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal. You may have even heard about the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023, which was serious legislation about flying saucers and alien bodies hidden by secret factions in the US government. You may be wondering, if UFOs are real, could alien abduction be real too?

Alien abduction narratives may be understood as a symptom of schizotypy caused by hypnotic suggestion

However, if you’re reading this article from me, a person who still believes that ETs, now known as nonhuman intelligences (NHI), can telepathically share dreams with people, then you are likely one of the special people that skeptical researchers call “fantasy prone” or, worse, schizotypal. Schizotypy affects around 4% of people and is sometimes classified as a personality disorder. It is characterized by eccentric beliefs and a tendency to become absorbed in fantasy. Harvard memory research, Susan Clancy, concluded that people who believe they may have been abducted by aliens do so because they are schizotypal people yearning for spiritual meaning.

The idea is simple: some people have powerful imaginations, dreams, or intuitions that make it seem like their fantasies are real. I say that we’re actually perceiving real worlds through real senses, but that it is dreamlike in nature and therefore requires interpretation. Most abductees or experiencers wonder if their contact experience was a dream or real. The abduction researchers say it is real. The skeptics say it is a dream. I say it is both.

The reason for the divide is also simple. The skeptics can’t understand why the abductees and credulous researchers can believe such crazy stories. The experiencers have lived through something that society has not prepared them for, for which they have no concepts, and therefore they know that their experience is real. It has transformed their lives, how could it not be real?

My research history

I seriously started researching alien abduction in 2020 when I decided to work with experiencers and their missing time episodes as part of my Depth Hypnosis practice, which is clearly defined as spiritual counseling. From my training, I knew that hypnosis was an unreliable method of memory recovery and that there was some controversy about the subject. I only knew vague details about the controversy, so I started researching missing time, recovered memory, and alien abduction research. I eventually did dozens of missing time and ET/UFO encounter sessions. I wrote the book Missing Time Found about the shamanic dreaming hypothesis, which suggests it can be both real and a dream. I wrote the book Galethog the Grey’s Field Guide to Anomalous Geometry about the use of body marks as physical evidence for alien abduction, which suggests that they must be understood as omens or anomalies unless included within a scientific study with established hypotheses.

After writing two books on the subject, I then discovered the secret lurid history of alien abduction research. It should have been obvious to begin with, but many smart people were talking about UFOs as real and how there could be alien biologics held by the government (see the 2017 NYT article or Grusch’s claims). Many sincere people were sharing their stories about modern day abductions (see Blumenthal’s abductee article). I didn’t think I needed to look into the history of abduction research because I figured these other smart and sincere people must have looked into them.

However, I was guided by my dreams of a Tall Grey ET from Zeta Reticuli who kept pushing me to understand the literary chain of events that caused the 1990s abduction narrative and the contemporary UAP disclosure narrative. My research into body marks made me realize that abduction reports follow a simple pattern: a researcher/experiencer makes a definitive report to a community, then the experiencers (or schizotypal people) respond with their own fantastic narratives supported by documentation of anomalies like skin marks or UFO videos. The researcher interprets the response as confirmation of their hypotheses because these people were literally confirming them.

UFO Abduction Syndrome defined in Unusual Personal Experiences

The dreams forced me to search for the definitive reports of alien abduction and body mark, then to use those reports as stable ground to make sense of the entire narrative. I found a booklet written by Mack, Hopkins, Jacobs, and Westrum that was funded by Bigelow and the Prince of Liechtenstein called Unusual Personal Experiences, published in 1992. It was mailed to 100k mental health professionals, served as a “scientific” basis to engaged mental health professionals through conferences and lectures, and supported all the alien abduction researchers in their national TV appearances (likely helpful to their careers as best-selling abduction authors).

Argument that UFO Abduction Syndrome is harmful psuedo-science

The argument that the Unusual Personal Experiences booklet is pseudo-science is simple:

It appears like science because:
1. it published a clinical definition of the UFO Abduction Syndrome
2. It offered therapy recommendations
3. It was introduced by John Mack, professor of Psychiatry
4. It was endorsed by John Carpenter, a credentialed social worker
5. It was mailed to 100k mental health professional
6. It included a robust survey from the Roper organization
It was not science because:
1. The clinical definition and recommendations were written by Hopkins the modern artist, Jacobs the history professor, and Westrum the sociologist
2. It did not specifically ask about alien abduction (later surveys only found 3 abductees out of 2k)
3. Skeptics immediately observed that many of the indicators of UFO Abduction Syndrome were actually sleep paralysis or out of body experience symptoms
4. Its reference list is extremely sparse
5. It was not peer-reviewed
6. It was not publicized through normal channels of science
7. It used extraordinary funds from Bigelow and Liechtenstein to bypass science and engage mental health professionals

My argument that it caused harm is simple:

The UFO Abduction Syndrome is arguably an exotic sleep/dream phenomenon
Hypnosis, the primary mode of knowledge, is known to produce dream-like states since the 1950s and is known to be unreliable for memory since at least 1994
Dreams respond to intention and attitudes about them, i.e., cultural programming
The authors of the UFO Abduction Syndrome clearly attempted to “program” cultural perceptions of aliens through direct manipulation of the mental health community
The authors presented a nightmarish view of abduction, from which there was only trauma and no escape.
The authors targeted the arguably vulnerable population of schizotypal people to integrate their alien abduction perspective and to serve as subjects/victims in their best-selling abduction books. For example, Mack signed a $200k book deal before he introduced Unusual Personal Experiences.
I was a child in the 1990s and personally testify that the direct actions of this research group caused traumatizing fears of alien abduction, which is qualitatively different from ghost stories because of its pseudo-science character.

Abductology is relevant to contemporary UAP/NHI narratives

Why does 1990s alien abduction research matter today? There are three reasons. First, the myth of repressed memory, which is central to abduction, was falsified in 1994 but is still prevalent with around 60% of people believing in it. Second, UAP disclosure narratives appear to be an iteration of the same myth, perpetuated by the same or intimately connected people. Third, there may be a real ET/NHI encounter in dreams that is obscured by abduction narratives

Abductology imploded in 2011 with the publication of Rainey’s Priests of High Strangeness expose. She was Hopkins’s third wife and a PBS documentarian. She recorded many lurid facts about Hopkins and Jacobs that demonstrated their lack of research integrity. Jacobs was embarrassingly characterized as a pervert because he was known to request panties from his subjects/victims (he thought might contain alien semen) or suggest chastity belts from his favorite S&M shop (to stop rapist aliens from making hybrid babies). Hopkins was characterized as an author greedy for fame and money who was willing to manipulate his subjects/victims’ delusions to produce a story.

However, abductology continued on. People still report abductions. People still use the myth of repressed memory to support claims of face-to-face ET contact. There are now many “experiencer” communities, which are groups of people who experience ET/NHI encounter phenomenon like alien abduction. The UAP Disclosure Act of 2023 was arguably written under the influence of Mack’s abduction research, as demonstrated by Danny Sheehan’s role in supporting the legislation and his former role as Mack’s lawyer.

Why and how can abductology and its derivative worldviews be taken seriously in this day and age? There are two main reasons. First, this is not a question of science, it is a question of storytelling. The notions of abduction and crashed UFOs are much more compelling than false memory research conducted by credentialed researchers. Second, and perhaps more primary, Mack escaped the abductology implosion because of his untimely death in 2004. Like the quote from Batman, “you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain”.

Mack died a hero. My dream character, Galethog the Grey from Zeta Reticuli, who has marked my body with strange geometric glyphs, demands that I make Mack a villain. Why? Because his legacy is pseudo-science that prevents people from seeing the truth. It was obvious to skeptics in the 1990s that Mack was a fantasy-prone grifter who used questionable techniques to elucidate fantastic stories, all while earning huge sums of money through his book sales and enjoying prestige. He is lauded as the brave researcher from Harvard, whose secret tribunal could not find his research methods faulty (another problematic claim because Harvard gave up when Sheehan threatened legal-sophistry funded by Rockefeller). Even after discovering this lurid history, I still deeply respect Mack’s research and appreciate his dedication to experiencers.

The argument that abductology is pseudo-science was sketched in at least 1996 by Lynn et al, confirmed in 2005 by Clancy, and conclusively demonstrated by Rainey in 2011. Why hasn’t abductology died and why is Mack still revered in the experiencer community? I can think of two reasons. First, we are unconsciously moved by the stories and need them in our lives, which is why I have created DSETI, the Dream Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence, and have put forward the shamanic dreaming hypothesis in my book Missing Time Found. Second, researchers are unconsciously biased toward the notion that there is physical evidence for alien abduction.

There is little physical evidence for abduction, but smart people convincingly claim there is overwhelming physical evidence, why?

Where is the physical evidence for alien abduction experiences and why do people keep saying it exists? Many people, including myself, have repeated the claim that there is physical evidence for alien abduction. I repeated it because I read it in Mack, Hopkins, Jacobs, or through their influence. A primary source of this claim is Bullard’s 1987 folklore survey of abduction reports, in which he observed that many reports document anomalous body marks, although his research does not document the marks themselves. It appears that only Hopkins performed direct research into the body marks, collecting a scrapbook of photos that he would present as he lectured about alien abduction. The only surviving evidence of alien abduction includes references to Jacobs’s testing of “residue” (likely from his victim’s panties) and a video recording of Hopkins’s 2004 lecture to MUFON. While there are collections of photos published on the internet as symptoms of alien abduction, they have an urban legend quality and many of them simply copy Hopkins’s research without citation.

It appears that all major claims of physical evidence of alien encounters are derived from research funded by Robert Bigelow, sometimes with the Prince of Liechtenstein such as through the 1992 Unusual Personal Experiences booklet and the Abduction Study Conference at MIT. Roger Leir’s implant research and Kit Green’s abduction research was funded by National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), which was funded by Bigelow. All other claims arise from individual experiencers like Stan Romanek or else seem to reference the Bigelow-funded claims. I know this because I experienced an anomalous geometric body mark and sought for precedents in the abduction literature, the inquiry of which became my book Galethog the Grey’s Field Guide to Anomalous Geometry.

Why did Hopkins, Jacobs, Mack, Bigelow, and Liechtenstein believe there was overwhelming physical evidence for alien abduction? We are now at the heart of the question and approaching its secret lurid history. Before we penetrate the deepest mysteries of abductology, we need to understand the role of fantastic sexual trauma as authoritative evidence. Scholars have noted a similarity between satanic ritual abuse, medieval witch hunting, and alien abduction narratives. They all involve a) fantastic sexual trauma from supernatural entities, b) professional researchers/priests/hypnotists who elucidate testimony and make conclusions, and c) presentation of body marks as physical evidence. It appears that these narratives have particularly strong unconscious authority, which makes rational science impossible. In other words, fantastic sexual trauma as evidence for supernatural events overwhelms our capacity to rationally think about the claims. Laycock’s 2012 article Carnal Knowledge is the best review of the phenomenon in my opinion.

We now can complete address the question why smart men believe there is physical evidence but do not present it to the public. Until Unusual Personal Experiences in 1992, body marks were offered as physical evidence much in the same way that relics support spiritual narratives. Their authority was derived from the status of abduction tales as folklore and urban legend. Mack’s introduction to the booklet shifted the dialog from folklore to pseudo-science. All claims from that moment forward reference the authority of Mack as a medical scientist. According to personal communications from the John E Mack Institute, which were anecdotal statements, Mack eventually said that body marks are not effective evidence because it’s impossible to say for certain who caused the marks. However, his 1992 introduction and his 1994 book, as well as numerous media appearances, demonstrates that he supported body marks as evidence and used those claims to establish abductology as a pseudo-science.

Why did John Mack and David Jacobs believe there was overwhelming evidence for the fantastic sexual trauma narratives put forward by the modern artist Budd Hopkins? The answer is very human and is the secret lurid event that defined abductology along with my nightmares of aliens in the 1990s. Budd Hopkins was known to carry around a scrapbook of photos, likely collected from letters in response to his published stories and books. The scrapbook contained photos of weird marks and scars. A 1999 article asserted that it contained an image of a perforated labia and other intimate parts. The same article described an upcoming conference in which Hopkins would show the scrapbook and present testimony from his book Witnessed by an experiencer who Rainey later documented as lying, perhaps motivated by a promise of royalty shares of a movie deal.

Abductology as a strange erotica club

The picture is comically obvious once you see it. Any serious researcher like Mack or Jacobs would get in touch with Hopkins, made famous by his 1981 book Missing Time. The researchers would get together and would ask, “where’s the evidence?”. Hopkins, a powerful storyteller and charismatic speaker, would dramatically pull out his scrapbook. He would tell tall tales about abduction, human mutilation, and humiliating rape scenarios perpetuated by bizarre alien characters. He might open the book to a scoop mark, maybe wink about how a lady had to hike up her skirt to show him, like he did in the 2004 MUFON lecture. He might tell some more stories about how men are forced to ejaculate into alien technology, then he might turn the page to reveal a strange looking grid pattern of bruises on the naked back of a woman, perhaps like those later identified to be a bruise from a hot tub water intake value..

Jacobs and Mack at this point might feel titillated. They might have realized they were just looking at weird and kinky pornography narrated by Hopkins’s bizarre form of science fiction, but Hopkins’s hypnotic sincerity and wholesome nature may have reassured them that this was science and they were its brilliant pioneers. As Hopkins turned the page to show them a perforated labia, the researchers might have felt a growing conviction that aliens truly kidnapped the woman.

After seeing such gruesome, intimate, and perhaps strangely titillating photographs, the researcher may have felt guilty for their strange sojourn into the secret world of alien abduction erotica at the center of Hopkins’s bizarre personal mythologies. However, they were initiated into the secret world of physical evidence for alien abduction. At the end of the session, they must have felt such strong conviction that they were scientists (not immature boys ogling women) because they were so sure of themselves in 1992 that they recommended hypnosis to 100k mental health professionals. Either they were just curious humans looking at strange pornography unethically collected by Hopkins or else they were scientists on the cusp of proving that aliens would fly from Zeta Reticuli to kidnap and rape humans.

How and why did Robert Bigelow and the Prince of Liechtenstein believe in the fantastic sexual trauma narratives put forward by Hopkins, Jacobs, and Mack? While I have no evidence for this, I imagine that they all got together in some secret hotel room at an early conference to leer over Hopkins’s scrapbook like boys leer over stolen Playboys. Whatever the event was, it was sufficient to convince them to spend at least $250k (close to half a million today) in support of abduction research. Perhaps if I was the wealthiest monarch in Europe or a real estate tycoon, I would rather spend a “few tens of thousands of dollars” on research that confirmed aliens exist rather than confront my own sexual kinks, that way you don’t have explain why you were looking at strange pornography to a live performance of erotic science fiction in a room full of old white men.

The overwhelming conviction that there is physical evidence for alien abduction, which is mirrored by the overwhelming conviction that there is physical evidence for UAP crashes, seems to derive from unconscious dynamics within very smart and prominent researchers.Their kinks, along with America’s hunger for bizarre sex stories, defined alien abduction. The reason why Mack and Jacobs said there was overwhelming physical evidence for alien abduction was because Hopkins showed them photos like perforated labias. The reason why we can’t find the evidence is that it doesn’t actually exist. The scrapbook is not evidence because it was never published. The little research and evidence we do have is inconclusive and likely just documentation of anomalies. What if we believe that UAP crash retrieval claims are reasonable because we have simply been conditioned to believe there is physical evidence for alien abduction?

Conclusion: ET/NHI encounters are dreamlike, real, empowering if you want them to be

I believe there is a real phenomenon of ET/NHI encounters that is primarily associated with dreams and dreamlike experiences. I do not believe we are powerless against alien abduction because I know that we are not powerless against sleep paralysis and nightmares. If dreams respond to intention, attitudes, and mindfulness, then whatever causes alien abduction narratives must also respond to human intent. Therefore, I say that the disempowering narratives of alien abduction and UAP crash retrievals may be harmful because they disempower humanity within the natural ET/NHI encounter phenomena typically experienced through shamanic dreaming.

I say that Hopkins, Jacobs, Mack, and those who funded their pseudo-science are personally responsible for the harm caused by the propagation of the UFO Abduction Syndrome to the mental health community. I experienced traumatizing fear of alien abduction instead of empowering connection with NHIs because of alien abduction programming, which I have just demonstrated to be derived from the sexual kinks of Hopkins, Jacobs, and Mack. I do not want another generation of powerful dreamers to suffer because of the unconscious sexual preferences of three old white men and the wealthy patrons of their bizarre erotica.

There is so much more to say about ET/NHI encounters than exposing the leering and lurid quality of Mack, Hopkins, and Jacobs. However, in order to work with the mainstream about these real dream encounters, I must address the existing research. I cast light into this history so that I may clear it from our vision. I do so that we may focus on the actual phenomenon of ET/NHI contact, not what three arguably creepy men and their wealthy sponsors thought about it.

This article is a part of a larger inquiry into ET/NHI contact, hypnosis, and shamanic dreamwork.

PS: Part of me really wishes that alien abduction and UAP crash retrievals are real because I want to believe. I am actively considering the notion that real alien bodies and UFOs interdimensionally teleport like spiritualist apports, which has some precedent in dream studies literature. However, the evidence is so sparse that it would be ridiculous to present it as anything besides speculation. At the end of this inquiry, I am more confident that dreams are meaningful and our ET/NHI encounters through dreamlike modes of of experience are worthy of reverence and study.

PPS: I was strong in my analysis of Mack because the lurid history of abductology needs to be cleared away. I know that Mack’s work is strong enough to stand on its own after the flimsy props of regression hypnosis are kicked away. For the record, I find Passport to the Cosmos to be still inspiring even after my discovery of the lurid history.

D-SETI Dreamwork

Secret Lurid History of Alien Abduction