Are You Experienced?

In what I hope will be the last of the lockdown-inspired binge-watches of overlooked scifi television series, I watched the two seasons of People of Earth. The title, by the way, comes from the classic Earth vs the Flying Saucers (1956) in which the aliens broadcast, “People of Earth. Attention!" I had seen some episodes of People of Earth back in 2016 on TBS but its time slot and my own schedule meant I missed much of the 1^st season and all of the 2^nd. (All the episodes for a season 3 were written, but the show was canceled before any were shot.) This is a solidly funny series that embraces its silly premise yet doesn’t undermine itself by trying too hard to be goofy. It also pleasantly respects its characters even when they are crazy. A few of them are indeed crazy, but not because they believe they have been abducted. In the context of the show they are correct. Oddballs, after all, can have anomalous experiences, too.

Synopsis: Ozzie (Wyatt Cenac) is a journalist who travels to the small town of Beacon NY to write a piece on StarCrossed, a support group for alien abductees. (“Experiencers!” as he is quickly corrected, for calling them abductees “is like slut-shaming!”) Each group member has his or her own backstory: often a troubled one as human backstories commonly are. The group leader Gina (Ana Gasteyer), for instance, is a former therapist who gave up her practice after convincing a patient to face his fear of skydiving: he died on his first jump. The members describe three kinds of aliens: whites, greys, and reptilians. Their encounters ranged from scary to romantic, but there nonetheless were similarities in some details of the events. Ozzie believes the StarCrossed members to be harmless nuts until he starts having vague memory flashes and anomalous perceptions (e.g. a deer in his mirror) that make him question if he himself is suppressing an abduction memory.

Thumbs Up, even though Season 2 (while clearing up some subplots) ends on a cliffhanger.

The show plays off our familiarity with the alien abduction narrative in real life. The abduction phenomenon is not as rare as one might imagine. 1 in 50 Americans claims to have been abducted by aliens. 329,000,000 [the US population] times 0.02 divided by 38 years [the median age in the US] means that, if we accept the claims, 173,158 people are abducted every year in the United States alone. This is ludicrous. The sky would be ablaze with flying saucers every night. So what is going on? Are the self-styled abductees just lying attention-seekers? Some of them (maybe a lot of them) probably are. But not all. Maybe not most.

Dr. John Cline (Yale psychologist and sleep expert) discusses the subject in Psychology Today. “Anomalous experiences,” he writes, “include such phenomena as synesthesia, hallucinations, lucid dreaming, past-life memories, and alien abduction, among others. The first thing that I want to make clear is that people who report these experiences are not psychotic and most are not simply advancing a hoax. In fact, going public with these reports can have a negative effect on your standing in most communities.”

Assume for the moment that the abduction memories are false. Where do they come from and why do so many people who have them believe in them so firmly? It is well to remember that human memories of any kind are unreliable. People regularly remember things differently from the way video footage (when available) shows them to have happened. Recovered memories notoriously are commonly invented out of whole cloth – in particular those obtained through hypnosis. In the 1980s there was a string of horrible criminal cases in which recovered memories resulted in convictions that later were overturned by DNA evidence. (Though cheap and easy today, DNA testing wasn’t used in criminal court prior to 1989 and was a laborious, uncommon, and expensive process through the ‘90s.) Despite three decades of debunking, 42% of therapists still are positive toward recovered memories today, which is just plain scary. Even when eyewitnesses don’t recover repressed memories but simply report what they saw immediately after it happened, they often get it wrong. “Often” means tens of thousands of false identifications of suspects each year, most of whom fortunately are not brought to trial. Some, however, are. The Innocence Project (see https://www.innocenceproject.org/dna-exonerations-in-the-united-states/) uses DNA evidence to reexamine cases of people convicted on the basis of eyewitness testimony, and has exonerated hundreds of prisoners. 85% of the false convictions involved “misidentification by a surviving victim.” The witnesses believed what they said and were entirely credible to the juries. Furthermore, some witnesses stubbornly stuck to their identifications in spite of the DNA pointing to someone else – in some cases to specific criminals with records of similar crimes. The witnesses aren’t crazy and aren’t hoaxers: they are just wrong.

There is a difference, of course, between misremembering a human face and remembering an extraterrestrial face – but only because more of us regard the latter as unlikely. Flying saucers, however, have been part of the popular culture for more than seven decades, and alien abductions have been in the news and popular media (e.g. the TV show The Invaders [1967]) since the 1961 Barney and Betty Hill abduction case in New Hampshire. One can see how such elements of popular culture can be a basis for reconstructed memories. There are parallels to reports of ghost encounters, which are more frequent than alien encounters. A 2019 Gallup poll showed a third of Americans believe aliens have landed on earth, but according to a CBS News poll fully 48% of Americans believe in ghosts with another 7% unsure. Given those numbers, it is not surprising that moments of distorted perception (or outright hallucinations, which, as Dr. Cline notes, “are much more common than generally recognized”) sometimes result in ghost sightings. Altered states of consciousness (with or without drugs) can be brought on by countless internal and external factors. We are much more apt to accept consequent weird perceptions or memories as real if they don’t violate our pre-existing belief systems.

Lucid dreams – dreams which seem real even after we wake – are a phenomenon with which I have direct experience. One example is minor. I clearly remember having got up in the middle of the night on one occasion to let the cat out, and would have sworn I did. Yet, I found him asleep in the house in the morning – no cat doors, no open windows, no unlocked doors, and no other house guests. Then there is my ghost story. Three days after my sister died (25 years ago this June), she called me on the phone. Again it was the middle of the night. I remember the call as vividly and matter-of-factly as I do the robo-call I got a few hours ago urging me to switch my electric service. Being a skeptic, I have no doubt that it was a vivid dream and that a video camera would have shown me snoring away all night without ever answering the phone, but the point is that it seemed real the next day and still does. Were my belief system more of a paranormal bent, it would be very easy to interpret the event differently. So, too, if ET came a-knockin’ in the middle of the night.

The reader may notice that I left out one possible explanation for the abduction stories: the possibility that the “experiencers” were abducted by aliens. Perhaps they were, but until I’m personally levitated into the spaceship I’m disinclined to believe it.