I wrote this paper in the Subtle Bodies II course within the Integral Noetic Science program at CIHS.
What is alien abduction, why is it relevant, and how does it relate with subtle energy systems? Subtle energy systems refers to personal experiences that are known through subtle senses like intuition, imagination, spiritual vision, astral projection, and so on. We know about subtle energy systems through other worldly journeys, which Couliano (1991) noted are the subject of sacred texts across many cultures. Outside of sacred texts, we know about them through published literature and reports, such as through Monroe’s famous Journeys Out of Body trilogy. Monroe’s work defined the field and many out of body experience (OBE) writers reference his work, such as Leland’s Otherwhere (2018). Many researchers familiar with OBEs, sleep paralysis, and dreams suggest that exotic dreams states may explain most abduction reports (see Raduga et al., 2020; Gackenback, 1989; Blackmore, 1998; Leland, 2018). This paper examines the topic of alien abduction as an exotic state of consciousness like OBEs or sleep paralysis and will follow Couliano’s approach to treating the topic like a literary genre similar to dreams (1991, p 7).
This paper is modeled as a research article with introduction, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion sections. I will introduce the topic of alien abduction and discuss its cultural relevance in this section. I will consider the topic from multiple subtle energy schools of thought, primarily as OBEs described by Leland (2018) and as spiritual literature described by Couliano (1991). I will look to the 1992 definition of the UFO Abduction Syndrome, published in the Unusual Personal Experiences booklet as the most relevant definition of alien abduction. The methods section will introduce the practice of content analysis and define my scope of inquiry. I used content analysis on around 200k dreams from the public web and academic databases to compare prevalence rates of words associated with the key indicators of UFO Abduction Syndrome. The analysis produced the figures section that organizes dozens of charts for the various dream categories that I examined. The results section documents my observations of the content analysis. The discussion section contextualizes the results with prevalence rates from the literature, while considering the topic from multiple subtle energy schools of thoughts and multiple person perspectives. Finally, the conclusion considers the possibility that alien abduction is primarily a subtle energy experience, rather than physical.