CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

More and more people claim to have been abducted in spaceships and subjected to sexual assaults by their alien captors. Are their stories fact or fantasy? DR SIMON WESSELY reports.

THERE was an extraordinary story in Britain's The People newspaper recently, about seven people who claimed to have been abducted from their homes by aliens, taken on board spaceships, and then subjected to a series of humiliating sexual assaults.

Such reports are common in the United States. According to journalist Jim Schnabel, whose fascinating book Dark White: Aliens, Abductions And The UFO Obsession has just been published by Hamish Hamilton, the first case surfaced in the 1960s. Since then the topic has become a craze, with numerous journals and conventions devoted to these UFO abductions, as well as support groups for the alleged victims, known as UFO abductees.

The stories are so bizarre the instinctive reaction is to dismiss them as the delusions of individuals suffering from severe mental illness. However, the 'victims' are not usually mentally ill in the sense of suffering from a psychotic illness, nor are they drug or alcohol abusers. A recent paper in the prestigious Journal of Abnormal Psychology describes them as 'solid representatives of the American middle class'.

Most of those claiming to have been abducted by aliens said the experience began during sleep, and was associated with extreme emotional states. The victim may recall vivid, unexpected and frightening internal sensations, such as terror, visual hallucinations, choking sensations and other abnormal sensations affecting many parts of the body.

Neuropsychologists have suggested their experiences may be related to brief episodes of epileptic activity in the temporal lobe of the brain, also implicated in the genesis of complex hallucinations such as religious visions. Others have been linked to sleep-related disturbances such as sleep paralysis. This not uncommon phenomenon occurs in people either when going to sleep or on wakening, and causes muscle paralysis and frightening sensations such as choking.

These mechanisms may be sufficient to account for the abnormal sensations that herald a UFO experience but do not account for the fully formed stories of being transported to alien spacecraft. To understand those one needs to consider the victim's background and pre-existing beliefs.