When I was a kid I was fascinated with UFOs and Alien Abductions. My Grandmother had a set of the Time Life Mysteries of the Unknown books and I must have read the UFO one a million times. Incidentally, I now have that entire set and every book is pretty swell.
At that time I pretty much just accepted it as fact that there were aliens visiting earth, abducting people, studying us, watching us, and perhaps even responsible for us. I miss the innocence of youth in that respect. It was fun to believe in things like that.
Now, I can’t in good conscience believe that millions of Americans are being abducted by aliens. Although I can believe that lots of people see things in the sky that they can’t explain, I’m much more apt to write it off as a meteor, weather balloon, or airplane now. For that matter, I believe a number of people believe that they have been abducted by aliens.
Now that I’m grown, it’s that point that actually interests me more. Alien abduction is not simply something that happens to uneducated looneys. The phenomena has been reported by respectable people who otherwise lead completely healthy lives. These people so strongly believe that it happened to them that even under hypnosis, they stick to their story.
So why? The cultural phenomena is interesting to me. In a day when less and less people believe in religion and God, is the alien abduction just the next step in mankind’s collective lore? As a society, we have morphed a story of these abductions to the point that everyone who experiences this comes up with nearly the same story.
It’s not supernatural or spooky, but it is an interesting study in the lore of a collective culture. People are using this to describe things they can’t understand, or perhaps to psychologically cope with things that they don’t want to admit.
Just something I’ve been thinking about lately and reading up on. It’s a fascinating psychological subject with ties into history among many other interesting things.