Any people, given over to the power of contagious passion, may be swept by desolation, and plunged into ruin.

— Charles W. Upham, 1867

An epidemic of psychiatric illness is sweeping through North America. Before 1980, a total of no more than about two hundred cases had ever been found in the entire world, throughout the entire recorded history of psychiatry. Yet today, some proponents of the condition claim that it afflicts at least a tenth of all Americans, and perhaps 30 percent of poor people — more than twenty-six million individuals. An industry involving significant sums of money, many specialty hospitals, and numerous self-described experts, has rapidly grown up around the disorder.

The illness is multiple personality disorder (MPD), a condition that has always attracted a few wisps of controversy. Lately, these wisps have coalesced into clouds that, in drenching rainbursts, pour criticism on the disorder. An examination of the flawed reasoning, unsound claims, and logical inconsistencies of the MPD literature shows that well-founded concerns drive this storm of criticism.

What Is MPD?

MPD is classified as a dissociative disorder. The term dissociation refers to disruption in one or more mental operations that constitute the central idea of “consciousness": forming and holding memories, assimilating sensory impressions and making sense of them, and maintaining a sense of one’s own identity (American Psychiatric Association 1994, 477). The essence of dissociation is that material not in awareness influences behavior, mood, and thought (Spiegel and Schleflin 1994). Thus, the behavioral disturbances prominently manifested in dissociative disorders are considered to be unconscious: that is, resulting from forces beyond the patient’s awareness, beyond voluntary control.

The king of dissociative disorders is MPD,¹ also called dissociative identity disorder. Afflicted people episodically fail to recall vital data about themselves, but what distinguishes MPD from all other psychiatric conditions is the putative cause for these memory failures. The condition’s proponents claim the memory failures occur because patients are periodically taken over by one or more “alter personalities” (variously referred to as “identities,” “ego states,” “alters,” or “personality states”). These guest personalities, submerged since being formed during childhood — more on this later — rise to the surface and impose their own memories, thoughts, and behaviors on patients.

The essential feature of MPD, it is said, is that an individual’s behavior is controlled by two or more alters (Putnam et al. 1990); the separate identities are assumed involuntarily (Sarbin 1995; Watkins and Watkins 1984). One personality may feel “carried along in a panicked helpless state” as another endangers it or engages in behavior repugnant to it (Kluft 1983, 75). Patients are said to experience a sense of being made to misbehave or hurt themselves (Putnam 1991). Some theorists even claim the existence of “omnipotent alters,” which can simply compel patients to do their bidding (Lewis and Bard 1991). As an example, C. A. Ross writes of alters that “force [the patient] to jump in front of a truck. [The alters] then go back inside just before impact, leaving the [patient] to experience the pain” (Ross 1989, 115).

The image of all this is of an invading army usurping a government, an operator taking control of a machine, or a parasite attacking another organism. For example, contributors to the MPD literature frequently make statements such as, “If [the patient] drops her guard, the alters take over” (Bliss 1980, 1393). Proponents describe the original personality as the “host” — again recalling notions of a parasite — and describe the change from host to alter, or from one alter to another, as “switching.” Thus, a librarian may one minute be her forty-two-year-old true shy self, but behave in the next like a nine-year-old child, a deep-voiced, foul-mouthed logger, or a promiscuous woman who picks up men in bars (Putnam 1989, 111, 119-120).

These guest personalities, or “alters,” are believed to have many truly remarkable capabilities and qualities. Some have the task of reproducing — of creating new alters. Others, it is claimed, determine which alter will take control of the body at any particular time (Kluft 1995, 364). There are alters of people of the opposite sex, of the treating therapist, of infants, television characters, and demons. Alters of Satan and God, of dogs, cats, lobsters, and stuffed animals — even of people thousands of years old or from another dimension — have been reported by MPD proponents (Fifth Estate 1993; Ganaway 1989; Hendrickson et al. 1990; Kluft 1991b, 166; Kluft 1995, 366; Ross 1989, 112; Ross et al. 1989).

MPD proponents assert that all manner of activities — creating a work of art, driving a car, fighting, doing schoolwork, engaging in prostitution, cleaning a bathtub, or even baking chocolate-chip cookies — are performed by alters (Braun 1988; Putnam 1989, 104; Ross 1989, 112).

Alters are often wily, secretive, and elusive. For instance, R. P. Kluft (1991a) says he has identified guest personalities whose role is to deny that the patient has MPD, thus obscuring the diagnosis. Personalities are also said to try to trick therapists by hiding and impersonating each other (Putnam 1989, 113). They are said to be plastic: “Alter A may be somewhat different when it has been preceded by alter B than when it follows alter C” (Kluft 1988, 49). They are said to multiply: each alter can undergo a cascade of splits, resulting in what is called “polyfragmented” MPD (Frontline 1995; Ross 1994, 60). Or the opposite may occur: during therapy, several alters may coalesce into a kind of “superalter” (Kluft 1988). It is even claimed that they can permanently stop growing at some time, or temporarily stop aging by going into “inner hibernation” and then emerging to resume growing older (Ross 1989, 112). Cases reported in the last few years have shown a median number of two alters at the time of diagnosis; however, during treatment, a further six or twelve usually appear (Putnam et al. 1986; Ross et al. 1989). Sometimes many more are found: as many as one quarter of cases have twenty-six or more alters (Kluft 1988). And the longer patients remain in treatment, the more guest personalities are discovered (Kluft 1988; Kluft 1989): “It is the rule rather than the exception for previously unknown personalities to enter the treatment” (Kluft 1988, 54). Patients with 300 and 4,500 personalities have now been reported (Kluft 1988; Ross 1989, 121; Ross et al. 1989). Kluft has been consulted “several times” on cases where therapists claim — wrongly, Kluft says — to have counted “upward of 10,000 alters” (Kluft 1995, 363).

Why this nearly endless flowering of personalities? According to MPD proponents, it occurs because each trauma or major life change experienced by an MPD patient causes some or all of the alters to be created anew (Kluft 1988).

What Causes MPD?

According to proponents, extraordinary childhood traumas — usually sexual or other abuse by adults — lead to MPD.

The theory is as follows. Because the child cannot physically escape the pain, its only option is to escape mentally: by dissociating. Dissociation is said to defend against pain by allowing the maltreatment to be experienced as if it were happening to someone else (Atchison and McFarlane 1994; Braun 1989; Kluft 1985a; Kluft 1987; Ross 1995). The distress of this childhood maltreatment is also endured by employing repression, a mental mechanism that supposedly allows the child to forget that the abuse happened at all (Lynn and Nash 1994): “Now, not only is the abuse not happening to me, [but] I don't even remember it” (Ross 1995, 67).

Eventually, MPD proponents claim, these defenses begin to be overused — that is, enlisted more and more to cope with commonplace, everyday stressors (Braun 1986, 66; Putnam 1991). The abuse victim’s “dissociated internal structures are slowly crystallized” until they become personalities (Atchison and McFarlane 1994; Putnam 1989, 53-54; Ross 1995a, 67). As mentioned earlier, this alter-building process is supposed to occur almost exclusively in early childhood (Greaves 1980; Vincent and Pickering 1988).

What’s Wrong Here?

So stands the tottering house of MPD theory. Its foundation crumbles and termites gnaw; the storm beats upon it.

The house suffers from at least four serious ailments.

The first: What, exactly, is an “alter personality"?

One might believe that the disorder’s proponents would long ago have taken the elementary step of answering this fundamental question. Such a belief would be mistaken. The MPD literature contains not one single plain, understandable definition that would allow an alter to be recognized if it were encountered on the street, in a person one has known intimately for years, or even in oneself.

The vagueness and imprecision of the alter concept are shown by the frequency with which even MPD experts contradict each other on the fundamental attributes of these entities. As an example, Ross (1990) says patients’ minds are no more host to many distinct personalities than their bodies are to different people; another theorist believes that alter personalities are imaginary constructs (Bliss 1984). But in contradiction, DSM-IV and the writings of several MPD theorists repeatedly stress that alters are well-developed, distinct from one another, complex, and well-integrated (Kluft 1984b, Kluft 1987; Taylor and Martin 1944). Also, MPD-focused practitioners routinely report patients who have dozens or hundreds of personalities — yet Spiegel (1995) has recently claimed that because MPD patients cannot integrate various emotions and memories, such patients actually have less than one personality, not more than one.

Contradictions abound elsewhere, too. On the one hand, Bliss (1984) believes personalities have specific and limited functions, and possess only a narrow range of moods. But on the other, Braun (1984) and other proponents (Putnam 1989, 104; Ross 1989, 81) say that fragments do not have a wide range of mood or affect. One proponent states that fragments “carry out a limited task in the person’s life” (Ross 1989, 81), but then later in the same publication (111-118) argues that personalities may perform only one specific function, represent only a single mood or memory, or exhibit only a narrow range of skills.

This failure to rigorously define the concept of a guest personality leads to all manner of excesses. For example, MPD proponents discover MPD in people whose close relatives, and others who have known those people for years, have never once seen any evidence of alters (Ganaway 1995). Kluft (1985b), for instance, diagnosed the disorder in a series of people — even though he himself acknowledged that almost half of them showed “no overt signs” of MPD. These proponents also find MPD even in people who lack any knowledge whatever of having the condition (Bliss 1980; Bliss 1984; Kluft 1985b), and at least one enthusiast recommends that people be treated for MPD even if they claim not to have the disorder (Putnam 1989, 139, 215).

The imprecision of the alter concept allows MPD adherents to claim that scores of patient behaviors should signal the possible presence of guest personalities. Thus, adherents claim that the following behaviors — and many others — are important diagnostic clues for MPD: glancing around the therapist’s office; frequently blinking one’s eyes; changing posture, or the voice’s pitch or volume; rolling the eyes upward; laughing or showing anger suddenly; covering the mouth; allowing the hair to fall over one’s face; developing a headache; scratching an itch; touching the face, or the chair in which one sits; changing hairstyles between sessions; or wearing a particular color of clothing or item of jewelry (Franklin 1990; Loewenstein 1991; Putnam 1989, 118-123; Ross 1989, 232). In one case known to the author, a leading MPD proponent claimed that the diagnosis was supported by behavior no more remarkable than the fact that the patient changed clothes several times daily and liked to wear sunglasses.

These beliefs about personalities raise some difficult questions that MPD enthusiasts fail to answer. First, how does alter-induced behavior differ from behavior people show every day — say, when they are angry or happy (Piper 1994a)? Do indwelling alters or fragments cause all feelings? If not, how does one determine which emotions result from the activities of alters, which from those of fragments, and which from neither? One proponent acknowledges the difficulty posed by these questions: he says alters may be indistinguishable from the original personality (Kluft 1991b).

Second, how do persons claiming they are overpowered by “irresistible alters” differ from those who attempt to avoid legal sanctions by claiming that, when they committed crimes, they couldn't control their behavior (Piper 1994c)?

Finally, one wonders how seriously to take MPD enthusiasts’ claims that they can accurately keep track of fifteen or thirty invisible alters — or 4,500 — when those alters are deceiving the therapist, growing, splitting, ceasing to age, reproducing, coalescing, going into “inner hibernation,” and changing their characteristics depending on which personality preceded or followed their appearance.

In summary, knowing how to test or prove an assertion that an individual has more than one personality, or how to clinically distinguish between personalities, ego states, identities, fragments, personality states, or the like, is impossible in the absence of agreement about what any of these terms mean (Dinwiddie et al. 1993; Aldridge-Morris 1993, ch. 1). It follows, then, that few limits exist to the number of “personalities” one may unearth. The number is restrained only by the interviewer’s energy and zeal in searching, and by his or her subjective — and perhaps idiosyncratic — sense of what constitutes an alter (Dinwiddie et al. 1993).

Enthusiasts thus expand the concept of personality beyond all bounds. If such a grandly expansive definition is employed, finding thousands of MPD “patients” becomes simple. Without clear behavioral criteria allowing the observer to know when a personality has been encountered, the term personality comes to mean anything and everything patient and clinician want it to. It thus comes to mean nothing.

The second affliction of the house of MPD is laid bare by one startling fact: the disorder’s most dramatic signs appear after, not before, patients begin therapy with MPD proponents.

Those eventually given this diagnosis seek professional help because of many different kinds of psychiatric difficulties. When first presenting for treatment, these patients can exhibit signs or symptoms of each and every psychiatric condition (Coons et al. 1988; Putnam et al. 1986; Bliss 1984). One complaint, however, is conspicuously absent: evidence of separate alter personalities (Brick and Chu 1991; Franklin 1990; Kluft 1984a; Kluft 1985a; Ross 1989, 93).

But when the patients enter MPD-focused therapy, signs of alters’ behaviors skyrocket. For instance, one patient’s guest personalities created apparent grand mal seizures (Kluft 1995); another sold drugs when the host was supposed to be at work (the host would supposedly “come to” miles away) (Putnam 1989, 198). According to proponents, much of the behavior of MPD patients results from alters’ “personified intrapsychic conflicts” (Putnam et al. 1986, 291); the personalities create crises in the patient’s life by attempting to dominate, sabotage, and destroy one another (Kluft 1983; Kluft 1984c). As one example, an alter may lead the patient into compromising circumstances — say, a sexual encounter, an episode of firesetting, or an illegal drug purchase. This personality then vanishes, leaving the patient, who “wakes up” not knowing how he or she got into the situation, to handle the problem (Confer and Ables 1983; Kluft 1991b).

MPD patients often significantly deteriorate during treatment (Kluft 1984c; Ofshe and Watters 1994, ch. 10; Pendergrast 1995, ch. 6). One of the disorder’s leading adherents acknowledges that MPD psychotherapy “causes significant disruption in a patient’s life outside the treatment setting” and that suicide attempts may occur in the weeks following the diagnosis (Putnam 1989, 98, 299). As MPD psychotherapy progresses, patients may become more dissociative, more anxious, or more depressed (Braun 1989); the longer they remain in treatment, the more florid, elaborate, and unlikely their stories about their alleged childhood maltreatment tend to become (Ganaway 1995; Spanos 1996, ch. 20). This worsening contributes to the lengthy hospitalizations — some costing millions of dollars (Frontline 1995; Piper 1994b) — that often occur when MPD patients who are well-insured are treated by the disorder’s enthusiasts. Hospitalizations occur more frequently after the MPD diagnosis is made (Piper 1994b; Ross and Dua 1993).

MPD-focused therapists have struggled mightily to explain these rather embarrassing results of their interventions. Examining these explanations is beyond the scope of this article: see Piper 1995; Piper 1997; Simpson 1995. However, several recent malpractice juries have found the explanations unimpressive. The juries have preferred a simple and logical explanation for the worsening status of these patients: patients worsen after beginning MPD-focused therapy because therapists cause them to do so — by, among other things, encouraging ever-more-dramatic displays of “alters.”

One important way in which therapists encourage such displays is to behave as if alter personalities were real. For example, leading authorities in this field routinely call alters out, hypnotize them, engage in “lengthy monologues” with them, name them, establish treatment alliances with them, talk to their stuffed animals, take them for walks to McDonald’s ("The outside world often seems very big and frightening to child personalities”), engage in playful parody and sarcasm with them, allow them to work on age-appropriate childrens’ projects in occupational therapy ("to show respect for the alter”), and recruit one alter to keep another from hurting still a third (Ross 1989, 227, 252-254; Ross and Gahan 1988). Other MPD adherents encourage alters to solve problems among themselves, to learn the Golden Rule, to participate in “internal group therapy,” and even to decide whether or not the host should enter treatment (Caul 1984; Kluft 1993; Ross 1989, 209).

In 1988, Vincent and Pickering noted that in the published reviews of the literature, exactly one case presenting in childhood was reported in the 135 years prior to 1979. After reviewing the literature published since 1979, they were able to gather a mere twelve cases. (It seems, however, that Vincent and Pickering had to stretch a bit to find even those — four of the twelve were examples not of MPD, but rather of something the authors called “incipient MPD.”) Nine additional cases were found by Peterson (1990).

These minuscule numbers, standing in stark contrast to the thousands of adult cases discovered in recent years, reveal the third weakness: if MPD results from child abuse, then why have so few cases been discovered in children?

The fourth and final weakness of the house is that it is built in a bog, namely, the belief that childhood maltreatment causes MPD. The literature strongly implies that childhood trauma has been unequivocally established as the primary cause of the disorder, and that severe sexual abuse more or less directly leads to MPD (Braun 1989, 311; Ellason and Ross 1997; Putnam 1989, 47; Ross 1989, 101; Ross 1995, 505; Schafer 1986).

Several commentators have recently noted this formulation’s deficiencies. Esman (1994) warns of the dangers of attempting to discover unitary causes of psychiatric disorders; he urges “measured skepticism” about assigning a role for sexual abuse, independently of other aspects of disturbed family function, in the genesis of later adult psychopathology. Numerous investigators, raising similar cautions, state that general family pathology in childhood better predicts adult dysfunction than does childhood sexual abuse alone (Bifulco et al. 1991; Fromuth 1986; Harter et al. 1988; Levitt and Pinnell 1995; Nash et al. 1993). Further, studies repeatedly note the difficulty of separating effects of abuse from the “matrix of disadvantage” giving rise to that abuse (Nash et al. 1993; Bushnell et al. 1992; Hussey and Singer 1993; Mullen et al. 1993). And finally, recent studies warn of the “very real uncertainties that surround evidence” concerning the relationship between childhood sexual abuse and psychiatric disorders (Fergusson et al. 1997), and conclude that available evidence to date does not support sweeping generalizations about childhood sexual abuse as an isolated cause of adult psychopathology (Beichtman et al. 1992; Finkelhor 1990; Levitt and Pinnell 1995).

The evidence for and against a relationship between trauma and dissociative pathology has also been examined. The data should “inspire skepticism, or at least serve to mute the grand conclusions about univariate cause and effect between trauma and dissociation that abound in the professional and lay literatures” (Tillman et al. 1994, 409).

Yet another weakness of this literature is inadequate verification of its child-abuse claims (Frankel 1993; Piper 1994a; Piper 1997). MPD patients very often report bizarre and extremely improbable experiences. For example, in a recent case familiar to the author, one patient claimed to have witnessed a baby being barbecued alive at a family picnic in a city park; another patient alleged repeated sexual assaults by a lion, a baboon, and other zoo animals in her parents’ back yard — in broad daylight. (It should be mentioned that both therapists in these cases are prominent MPD adherents, and neither appeared to have any difficulty believing these allegations). Despite the frequency of claims of this type, “repressed memory patients are seldom referred to medical doctors for examination and possible corroboration of past abuse [though one would assume that] the horrific physical abuse allegedly experienced . . . would require medical care at some point” (Parr 1996). (Space limitations limit discussion of this weakness; see Jones and McGraw 1987; Lindsay and Read 1994; Ofshe and Watters 1994; Pendergrast 1994, chs. 3-5; Spanos 1996, ch. 20; Wakefield and Underwager 1995, ch. 10).

The logic of the claim that childhood trauma causes MPD demonstrates a final serious flaw. If the claim were true, the abuse of millions of children over the years should have caused many cases of MPD. A case in point: children who endured unspeakable maltreatment in the ghettoes, boxcars, and concentration camps of Nazi Germany. However, no evidence exists that any developed MPD (Bower 1994; Des Pres 1976; Eitinger 1980; Krystal 1991; Sofsky 1997) or that any dissociated or repressed their traumatic memories (Eisen 1988; Wagenaar and Groeneweg 1990). Similarly, the same results hold in studies of children who saw a parent murdered (Eth and Pynoos 1994; Malmquist 1986); studies of kidnapped children (Terr 1979; Terr 1983); studies of children known to have been abused (Gold et al. 1994); and in several other investigations (Chodoff 1963; Pynoos and Nader 1989; Strom et al. 1962). Victims neither repressed the traumatic events, forgot about them, nor developed MPD.

Concluding Comments

In the epigraph that begins this article, Upham speaks of the excesses of the seventeenth-century New England witchcraft craze. The story of Sarah Good exemplifies those excesses (Rosenthal 1993). In March of 1692, when thirty-eight years old and pregnant, she heard her husband denounce her to the witchcraft tribunal. He said that either she already was a witch, “or would be one very quickly” (Rosenthal 1993, 89). No one had produced evidence that she had engaged in witchcraft, no one had seen her do anything unusual, no one had come forward to say they had participated in satanic activities with her. But no matter.

On July 19, 1692, Sarah Good died on the gallows.

Three hundred years later, a woman in Chicago consulted a psychiatrist for depression (Frontline 1995). He concluded that she suffered from MPD, that she had abused her own children, and that she had gleefully participated in Satan-worshiping cult orgies where pregnant women were eviscerated and their babies eaten. Her failure to recall these events was attributed to alters that blocked her awareness. No one had produced any evidence for the truth of any of this, no one had seen her do anything unusual, no one had come forward to say they had participated in satanic activities with her. But no matter.

The doctor notified the state that the woman was a child molester. Then, after convincing her that she had killed several adults because she had been told to do so by satanists, he threatened to notify the police about these “criminal activities.”

The woman’s husband believed the doctor’s claims. He divorced her. And, of course, because she was a “child molester,” she lost custody of her children.

Charles Upham recognized the importance of erecting barricades against addlepated ideas blown by gales of illogic. The twentieth-century fad of multiple personality disorder indicates that even after a third of a millennium, such bulwarks have yet to be built.

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Note

1. In the fourth and latest edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the disorder has been renamed. Although the third edition called the condition MPD, the fourth calls it dissociative identity disorder. The differences between the two disorders’ diagnostic criteria are slight and mainly cosmetic: in the newer criteria, terms such as identities or personality states are employed, rather than the older personalities. Also, the newer definition emphasizes the patient’s inability to recall important personal information.

   Whether the newer term will become popular has yet to be seen; because MPD has the distinct advantage of familiarity, it will be used in this paper.

Klass’s previous books include UFOs: The Public Deceived and UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game, both published by Prometheus books. He has spent over thirty years investigating famous UFO incidents, hoping to find credible, scientific evidence of extraterrestrial visitors. He currently publishes the Skeptics UFO Newsletter (SUN), and is a Fellow of CSICOP and chair of its UFO Subcommittee. Klass, in short, is well qualified to separate the truths from the myths about the alleged Roswell crashed saucer. Through impartial research and meticulous documentation, Phil Klass has written the definitive book on the Roswell myth.

Klass starts off with contemporary accounts from 1947 — cold, hard facts that are not subject to the whims of memory. He details the UFO “craze” that swept the country in the summer of 1947, the Army Air Force announcement of the capture of a “flying disk,” and the explanation of the find as weather balloons and radar targets. Nowadays, UFO promoters maintain that the announcement of the “flying disk” came from high up the command — Col. Blanchard himself. (And, of course, top brass wouldn't have been fooled by a “balloon.”) But original reports indicate that the “disk” claim came from the intelligence office at the Roswell Army Air Force base — namely, one man, Major Jesse A. Marcel.

After its correct identification as weather equipment, the Roswell event drew no attention for decades. Klass details how both leading UFO groups (NICAP and APRO) did not even mention Roswell in their lists of “most important UFO cases” submitted for the Condon Report in 1966.

Details of Marcel’s earliest Roswell interviews, in February 1978, are provided by Klass. Marcel did not save any news clippings from this “historic” encounter; he couldn't even remember what year the incident took place.

Klass describes, and demolishes, the accounts of the long string of witnesses who waited decades before coming forward to claim their 15 minutes of fame: Grady Barnett, Glenn Dennis, Walter Haut, Gerald Anderson, Jim Ragsdale, Frank Kaufmann, Frankie Rowe, Col. Thomas Dubose, and more. Page 105 lists the wildly different estimates of the numbers of alien bodies (three living; three dead; four dead/one living; three dead; one living; and, one dead). The search for mortician Glenn Dennis’s “missing nurse” (Naomi Marie Selff) is detailed, along with strong evidence that she never existed. Witness Anderson’s diary copying and phone-record tampering severely damage his credibility.

Klass takes on all of the major pro-Roswell authors as well: Stanton Friedman, William Moore, Kevin Randle, Donald Schmitt, and others. He clearly documents how Friedman, Randle, and Schmitt all have changed the day rancher Brazel brought the debris into Roswell from Monday, July 7 (the actual day), to Sunday, July 6. They did so because that’s the only way they could reconcile events with witness Dubose’s testimony that the famous photographs of the debris in General Ramey’s office were taken at least two days after the debris was supposedly flown from Roswell to Fort Worth. (In actuality, the pictures were taken the same afternoon as the flight). Original reports, and Brazel’s comments that he came to Roswell to sell wool, clearly show that he did not go into town on the last day of a (then) rare three-day weekend. Klass also describes how author Donald Schmitt was caught faking his credentials.

The book also turns to UFO researcher Robert Todd’s discovery of the connection of the debris to New York University experiments performed in support of secret project Mogul, and the further evidence for this explanation developed by physicist/balloonist Charles B. Moore, UFO author Karl Pflock, and by the United States Air Force. The General Accounting Office report was portrayed by New Mexico Congressman Steve Schiff as leaving unanswered questions regarding some missing message traffic. But, Klass points out that the bottom-line conclusion of the GAO report was completely missed by most of the media: there is not one shred of evidence in the archives of the federal government that lends any credence to the supposed alien crash at Roswell (or any other locale). He also relates how once pro-Roswell pilot Kent Jeffrey came to agree that the Roswell Incident was due entirely to misidentification of weather equipment.

A major theme of the book is the continuing coverup of the truth about Roswell — not by the government, but by producers and authors of television shows, movies, and books. Klass tells how he has repeatedly tried to get TV producers to show formerly secret documents that prove the US did not have any physical evidence of alien visitors, even after Roswell. And Klass tells how, time and again, the truth has ended up on the cutting-room floor.

Klass concludes the book by discussing his work at Aviation Week and Space Technology. Aviation Week has revealed so many sensitive aerospace secrets that many government employees disparagingly refer to it as “Aviation Leak.” Yet, this fiercely independent magazine has never uncovered even a trace of a sinister coverup of alien visitation.

This book is a very valuable addition to the shelf of anyone with an interest in Roswell, or in the UFO movement in general. It does seem to hop around from topic to topic at times, and there is some unnecessary duplication. For example, a story from the Fort Worth Morning-Star Telegram appears on pages 17 and 18, but again (in its entirety) on pages 85 and 86. The same goes for the McCoy briefing (page 175, and repeated on page 208). But the biggest flaw of the book is the material that’s missing, such as Klass’ resounding debunking of the supposed “Majestic 12” forgeries. (Klass’s MJ-12 exposës are nevertheless available in book form, reprinted in the 1997 SI anthology The UFO Invasion.)

When I give talks about Roswell, I always show how Klass found that President Truman’s alleged signature on an MJ-12 letter was really just photocopied from a different, legitimate letter (see Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 14, No.2, Winter 1990). As transparencies of both signatures are overlaid, the audience always gasps in surprise as the different signatures blend into a single trace. Incredibly, Stanton Friedman still maintains the validity of MJ-12. When I confronted him on a radio show last year, he said Klass’s methods were shown false in his new book Top Secret/Majic. And what is Friedman’s new attack on the signature analysis? “The signatures are clearly not identical.” Simply outrageous!

Similarly, there was no mention of the supposed alien autopsy, or the Penthouse “photograph” of the alien’s body. I'm hoping that someday, some of these gaps will be filled, and that we'll be treated to a second edition of this excellent book. But even with its minor omissions, this book destroys the “Roswell” mythos once and for all.

If Gray Barker were alive today, he'd think he'd died and gone to heaven. Seems that now everyone has heard of the “Men in Black,” a concept he first raised to prominence in UFO lore.

And, of course, he'd try to make a fast buck off of them.

The late Gray Barker, head of Saucerian Publications and author of numerous books about flying saucers, was one of the most prolific writers and publishers in the “fringe” area of UFO fanaticism.

Some amusing yet disturbing details about Barker’s constructive (and certainly destructive) contributions to the fantasy world of UFOs have lurked in my files for decades. Despite the personal shame I attach to them, their general release is long overdue.

Gray and I never met face to face, but I owe to him the beginning of my journalistic career, and my only corrupt journalistic experience. In 1967, he published my somewhat juvenile “history” of the 1966 Michigan UFO “scare,” a book Gray titled Flying Saucers Are Watching You. Its publication gained me my first newspaper job. After that, Gray and I shared a lengthy correspondence, and he may even have considered me one of his protëgës. Gray also put me in touch with some of the more extravagant figures in the UFO field, including the notorious Richard Shaver of “Shaver mystery” fame, and enjoyed my reciprocal sense of humor.

I pulled Gray’s letters out of my files after my wife and I saw the trailer for the 1997 summer movie hit Men in Black, the Tommy Lee Jones/Will Smith megamillion-dollar movie spectacle that owes a fair share of its style to Gray’s 1956 book They Knew Too Much about Flying Saucers. The fact that I had kept the letters might bother Gray now, considering what I'm about to confess. In fact, Gray (and some others deceived by what he and I concocted) may meet me in hell with fangs at the ready. To those who were fooled, I certainly owe an apology for the role I played. But it’s time that this material was made public.

Barker’s day job was as a theatrical film booker in Clarksburg, West Virginia. He also was a talented writer, an early lover of flying-saucer lore, and a man who could make a good story better. He was hyperimaginative and could have written science fiction.

A lot of what he wrote probably was just that. But he always offered his accounts as fact.

They Knew Too Much about Flying Saucers made the Men in Black (M.I.B.) feared within UFO circles during the late 1950s and 1960s. The book now is hard to find, and my hardcover copy — the third printing — has crispy pages. In it, Gray told about alleged brushes between the sinister M.I.B. and a Connecticut man, Al K. Bender, who set the pace for what is now the stereotypical M.I.B. story: Someone sees a UFO and tries to tell the world about it. Without warning, three men in black suits and driving a big black car confront the witness. Afterwards, the witness appears too frightened to talk further about the UFO — or anything else. Woo-WOOO-oo!

In account after account within the pages of They Knew Too Much and subsequent writings by others (including John Keel, who began using the shorthand “M.I.B.” in his writings), the mysterious trio — who at times seem to have uncanny mental powers and weird, otherworldly faces — squelch all discussion about supposedly true UFO encounters. The whole notion smacked of a huge, pre-Watergate conspiracy.

As I began to write this apologetic revelation in July 1997, the news came that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency indeed may have participated in a coverup not unlike that supposedly initiated by the fabled M.I.B. U.S. intelligence historian Gerald K. Haines wrote an unclassified article for Studies of Intelligence, a CIA journal, revealing that during the 1950s the U.S. Air Force and other agencies actually did conspire to suppress the UFO issue and to concoct false cover stories to explain sightings of such super-secret U.S. spy planes as the U-2 and later the SR-71 Blackbird (the Internet address for Haines’s study is odci.gov).

So, Bender, Barker, and the rest indeed may have been inspired by a grain (or several grains) of truth. But that doesn't contradict what I am about to disclose about Barker’s participation in — and encouragement of — actual fraud to perpetuate sales of his UFO books and magazines.

I knew little about the bizarre world of “ufology” when I typed up a detailed account about the 1966 Michigan UFO sightings and sent the manuscript to Saucerian Publications, the book company Gray had set up with the profits from They Knew Too Much. Gray published my book in 1967, paid me a satisfying sum, and made me a published writer at age seventeen. With that on my resume, I got my first newspaper job, in my hometown of Marshall, Michigan. Two years later, I was working in the Battle Creek Enquirer newsroom in Battle Creek, Michigan, where I work as opinion-page editor today.

Meanwhile, Gray and I continued to correspond. Here’s one telling excerpt from a letter of his dated June 27, 1968: “Strictly off the record, unusual interest and fixation upon UFOs represents, in my opinion, a definite symptom of neurosis. . . . I cannot (again off the record) bear for very long most of the people and the fans of saucerdom, mainly because most of them are oral aggressors (i.e., they talk all the time about saucers and make you listen). I do genuinely like a few saucerers (and former saucerers) like yourself, who, along with their interest in saucers, seem to be pretty sane and can have a sense of humor about it.”

That same year, in creative zeal, I had sent to him a sci-fi piece I wrote about a scientific organization that discovers that UFOs are actually time machines, then encounters a more sinister enemy group of time-travelers who try to destroy them. The story began with a pseudoscholarly discussion by a fictitious scientist, Dr. Richard H. Pratt, about time travel and UFOs. The rest of it was about Pratt’s mysterious encounter with three strange individuals “trapped” in our own time.

Gray urged me to try to make the incident seem real by creating a fictitious organization out of whole cloth. In youthful amorality, I picked up Gray’s ball and sent a letter to Ray Palmer’s Flying Saucer magazine, which, in early 1969, published verbatim my anonymous announcement of the formation of an organization that identified itself only as the B.I.C.R., supposedly formed by three men whose names were given as William A. Gautier, Thomas Harper, and R. James Kipling (names I concocted using my shelf of books by great fiction writers). Meanwhile, as I prepared for my busy college years, I had disbanded a small but legitimate UFO-investigation group I had led since 1965 and ceased publishing a small “saucer 'zine” I had been sending to associates in thirteen states.

Gray’s letter quoted above went on about the reaction to the news in the UFO world about my UFO group’s disbandment: “Did you see Saucer Scoop?” he wrote. “They're doing a big deal on you, suggesting you really were hushed by the blackmen. I'll always be glad to print an article by you if you'll tell the real (or made up) story of how these strange forces made you quit. You might as well go out of saucers in the usual syndrome.”

I wrote to Gray saying that I would follow up in the form of a rewritten version of the Dr. Pratt/time-travel sci-fi piece I'd already sent him. I said I would make it clear that it was just a story. Here was his response on July 12, 1968: “I think that the sci-fi story you are thinking of, revealing at the end that it’s made up, would be a little too negative. Already some readers are accusing us of making up things (which we do occasionally of course). How about an article just making your exiting from research even more mysterious than ever!”

In my youthful naivetë and desire to be published, I didn't challenge the wrongness of this. It took me a few months to put together the revised story, now ready to be published as true. In a letter dated December 7, 1968, Gray coached me: “Try to make it as technical as possible to make it look like a real scientific report. The real scientists who read our 'zine will see the hoax and I hope take it as a joke.” My article “Flying Saucers: Time Machines,” by “Dr. Richard H. Pratt,” was published in the Spring/Summer 1969 issue of Barker’s magazine Saucer News, followed by “The Strange B.I.C.R. Affair” in the Summer 1970 issue.

An interim letter, recounting his work on a book about the West Virginia “Mothman” sightings, reflects Gray’s attitude about publishing fiction as nonfiction: “About half of it is a recounting of actual sightings and events in the Ohio Valley circa 1966. . . . I think that the ‘true accounts’ are told in an exciting way, but I have deliberately stuck in fictional chapters based roughly on cases I had heard about.” Evidently, Gray had few qualms about publishing as fact fictional material deliberately contrived for release under the Saucerian Press label and for Saucer News.

Gray wrote to me about the reaction to “Flying Saucers: Time Machines": “Evidently the fans swallowed this one with a gulp.” Subsequent notes in my files include copies of letters Gray sent to other UFO researchers, including Ray Palmer, disingenuously requesting follow-up data on the supposedly true identity of “Richard H. Pratt,” who now supposedly had dropped mysteriously from sight. These notes thankfully drew suspicion away from myself.

In early 1983, shortly before he died of a heart attack, Gray published another book, M.I.B: The Secret Terror Among Us, which he dedicated to Al K. Bender, the Connecticut man who had inspired They Knew Too Much. Gray devoted an entire chapter to “Dr. Pratt” and presented the story as if it really might be true. To my perpetual shame, I shut up again. After all, I told myself, Gray had given me my career break — and he was publishing my stuff. I tried to ignore that he was playing fast and loose with the truth. And I had realized that a lot of what he had written before probably was just as loose.

Over the years, I have received mail from various people who have wondered whether I might know something about the background of the strange “B.I.C.R. affair.” I always claimed that I knew nothing or that I didn't want to talk more about it. Even after Gray died, I kept quiet.

But the myth has moved to a new stage in its evolution, and it is only right that some background be provided about the man who helped to launch it. I have tuned in the TV series Night Skies and seen the Men in Black portrayed as government agents flying scary black helicopters. And, of course, it wouldn't surprise me to see Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith return in a sequel to last summer’s big movie hit. It’s only a matter of time before someone puts together a supposed “true history” of the M.I.B.; and because of Gray, it will be very difficult to separate the wheat (if there is any) from the chaff.

The saving grace is that the movie was presented as a comedy. That’s appropriate, because so much of it really is a huge joke. And that weird laughter you hear is coming from Gray Barker’s grave.

If you believe one set of claims, nearly four million Americans have been abducted by aliens. This figure has been widely publicized and is often assumed to mean that millions of people have been visited by members of an alien species and, in some cases, physically taken from their beds, cars, or homes to an alien craft or planet.

Personal accounts of abduction by aliens have increased since the publication of Budd Hopkins’s books Missing Time (1981) and Intruders (1987) and Whitley Strieber’s Communion (1987). There is considerable variation among the accounts, but many fit a common pattern. Wright (1994) summarized 317 transcripts of hypnosis sessions and interviews from 95 separate cases and concluded, “Numerous entity types have been visiting our planet with some regularity” (Part 2, p. 6). However, the “gray” is clearly the most common alien and over the years a typical account has emerged (see, e.g., Mack 1994; Schnabel 1994; Thompson 1993).

The experience begins most often when the person is at home in bed (Wright 1994) and most often at night (Spanos, Cross, Dickson, and DuBreuil 1993), though sometimes abductions occur from a car or outdoors. There is an intense blue or white light, a buzzing or humming sound, anxiety or fear, and the sense of an unexplained presence. A craft with flashing lights is seen and the person is transported or “floated” into it. Once inside the craft, the person may be subjected to various medical procedures, often involving the removal of eggs or sperm and the implantation of a small object in the nose or elsewhere. Communication with the aliens is usually by telepathy. The abductee feels helpless and is often restrained, or partially or completely paralyzed.

The “gray” is about four feet high, with a slender body and neck, a large head, and huge, black, slanted, almond-shaped eyes. Grays usually have no hair and often only three fingers on each hand. Rarer aliens include green or blue types, the taller fair-haired Nordics, and human types who are sometimes seen working with the grays.

The aliens’ purpose in abducting Earthlings varies from benign warnings of impending ecological catastrophe to a vast alien breeding program, necessitating the removal of eggs and sperm from humans in order to produce half-alien, half-human creatures. Some abductees claim to have seen fetuses in special jars, and some claim they were made to play with or care for the half-human children.

Occasionally, people claim to be snatched from public places, with witnesses, or even in groups. This provides the potential for independent corroboration, but physical evidence is extremely rare. A few examples of stained clothing have been brought back; and some of the implants have reportedly been removed from abductees’ bodies, but they usually mysteriously disappear (Jacobs 1993).

Theories

How can we explain these experiences? Some abductees recall their experiences spontaneously, but some only “remember” in therapy, support groups, or under hypnosis. We know that memories can be changed and even completely created with hypnosis (Laurence, et al. 1986), peer pressure, and repeated questioning (Loftus 1993). Are “memories” of abduction created this way? Most of Wright’s ninety-five abductees were hypnotized and/or interviewed many times. Hopkins is well known for his hypnotic techniques for eliciting abduction reports, and Mack also uses hypnosis. However, there are many reports of conscious recall of abduction without hypnosis or multiple interviews, and the significance of the role of false memory is still not clear.

Another theory is that abductees are mentally ill. This receives little or no support from the literature. Bloecher, Clamar, and Hopkins (1985) found above-average intelligence and no signs of serious pathology among nine abductees, and Parnell (1988) found no evidence of psychopathology among 225 individuals who reported having seen a UFO (although not having been abducted). Most recently, Spanos et al. (1993) compared forty-nine UFO reporters with two control groups and found they were no less intelligent, no more fantasy prone, and no more hypnotizable than the controls. Nor did they show more signs of psychopathology. They did, however, believe more strongly in alien visitations, suggesting that such beliefs allow people to shape ambiguous information, diffuse physical sensations, and vivid imaginings into realistic alien encounters.

Temporal lobe lability has also been implicated. People with relatively labile temporal lobes are more prone to fantasy, and more likely to report mystical and out-of-body experiences, visions, and psychic experiences (Persinger and Makarec 1987). However, Spanos et al. found no difference in a temporal lobe lability scale between their UFO reporters and control groups. Cox (1995) compared a group of twelve British abductees with both a matched control group and a student control group and, again, found no differences on the temporal lobe lability scale. Like Spanos’s subjects, the abductees were more often believers in alien visitations than were the controls.

A final theory is that abductions are elaborations of sleep paralysis, in which a person is apparently able to hear and see and feels perfectly awake, but cannot move. The International Classification of Sleep Disorders (Thorpy 1990) reports that sleep paralysis is common among narcoleptics, in whom the paralysis usually occurs at sleep onset; is frequent in about 3 to 6 percent of the rest of the population; and occurs occasionally as “isolated sleep paralysis” in 40 to 50 percent. Other estimates for the incidence of isolated sleep paralysis include those from Japan (40 percent; Fukuda, et al. 1987), Nigeria (44 percent; Ohaeri 1992), Hong Kong (37 percent; Wing, Lee, and Chen 1994), Canada (21 percent; Spanos et al. 1995), Newfoundland (62 percent; Ness 1978), and England (46 percent; Rose and Blackmore 1996).

The Sleep-Paralysis Experience

In a typical sleep-paralysis episode, a person wakes up paralyzed, senses a presence in the room, feels fear or even terror, and may hear buzzing and humming noises or see strange lights. A visible or invisible entity may even sit on their chest, shaking, strangling, or prodding them. Attempts to fight the paralysis are usually unsuccessful. It is reputedly more effective to relax or try to move just the eyes or a single finger or toe. Descriptions of sleep paralysis are given in many of the references already cited and in Hufford’s (1982) classic work on the “Old Hag.” I and a colleague are building up a case collection and have reported our preliminary findings (Blackmore and Rose 1996).

Sleep paralysis is thought to underlie common myths such as witch or hag riding in England (Davis 1996-1997), the Old Hag of Newfoundland (Hufford 1982), Kanashibari in Japan (Fukuda 1993), Kokma in St. Lucia (Dahlitz and Parkes 1993), and the Popobawa in Zanzibar (Nickell 1995), among others. Perhaps alien abduction is our modern sleep paralysis myth.

Spanos et al. (1993) have pointed out the similarities between abductions and sleep paralysis. The majority of the abduction experiences they studied occurred at night, and almost 60 percent of the “intense” reports were sleep related. Of the intense experiences, nearly a quarter involved symptoms similar to sleep paralysis.

Cox (1995) divided his twelve abductees into six daytime and six nighttime abductions and, even with such small groups, found that the nighttime abductees reported significantly more frequent sleep paralysis than either of the control groups.

I suggest that the best explanation for many abduction experiences is that they are elaborations of the experience of sleep paralysis.

Imagine the following scenario: A woman wakes in the night with a strong sense that someone or something is in the room. She tries to move but finds she is completely paralyzed except for her eyes. She sees strange lights, hears a buzzing or humming sound, and feels a vibration in the bed. If she knows about sleep paralysis, she will recognize it instantly, but most people do not. So what is she going to think? I suggest that, if she has watched TV programs about abductions or read about them, she may begin to think of aliens. And in this borderline sleep state, the imagined alien will seem extremely real. This alone may be enough to create the conviction of having been abducted. Hypnosis could make the memories of this real experience (but not real abduction) completely convincing.

The Roper Poll

The claim that 3.7 million Americans have been abducted was based on a Roper Poll conducted between July and September 1991 and published in 1992. The authors were Budd Hopkins, a painter and sculptor; David Jacobs, a historian; and Ron Westrum, a sociologist (Hopkins, Jacobs, and Westrum 1992). In its introduction John Mack, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, claimed that hundreds of thousands of American men, women, and children may have experienced UFO abductions and that many of them suffered from distress when mental health professionals tried to fit their experiences into familiar psychiatric categories. Clinicians, he said, should learn “to recognize the most common symptoms and indications in the patient or client’s history that they are dealing with an abduction case” (8). These indications included seeing lights, waking up paralyzed with a sense of presence, and experiences of flying and missing time. The report was published privately and mailed to nearly one hundred thousand psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals encouraging them to “be open to the possibility that something exists or is happening to their clients which, in our traditional Western framework, cannot or should not be” (8).

The Roper Organization provides a service for other questions to be tacked on to their own regular polls. In this case, 5,947 adults (a representative sample) were given a card listing eleven experiences and were asked to say whether each had happened to them more than twice, once or twice, or never. The experiences (and percentage of respondents reporting having had the experience at least once) included: seeing a ghost (11 percent), seeing and dreaming about UFOs (7 percent and 5 percent), and leaving the body (14 percent). Most important were the five “indicator experiences": 1) “Waking up paralyzed with a sense of a strange person or presence or something else in the room” (18 percent); 2) “Feeling that you were actually flying through the air although you didn't know why or how” (10 percent); 3) “Experiencing a period of time of an hour or more, in which you were apparently lost, but you could not remember why, or where you had been” (13 percent); 4) “Seeing unusual lights or balls of light in a room without knowing what was causing them, or where they came from” (8 percent); and 5) “Finding puzzling scars on your body and neither you nor anyone else remembering how you received them or where you got them” (8 percent).

The authors decided that “when a respondent answers ‘yes’ to at least four of these five indicator questions, there is a strong possibility that individual is a UFO abductee.” The only justification given is that Hopkins and Jacobs worked with nearly five hundred abductees over a period of seventeen years. They noticed that many of their abductees reported these experiences and jumped to the conclusion that people who have four or more of the experiences are likely to be abductees.

From there, the stunning conclusion of the Roper Poll was reached. Out of the 5,947 people interviewed, 119 (or 2 percent) had four or five of the indicators. Since the population represented by the sample was 185 million, the total number was 3.7 million -- hence the conclusion that nearly four million Americans have been abducted by aliens.

Why did they not simply ask a question like, “Have you ever been abducted by aliens?"? They argue that this would not reveal the true extent of abduction experiences since many people only remember them after therapy or hypnosis. If abductions really occur, this argument may be valid. However, the strategy used in the Roper Poll does not solve the problem.

With some exceptions,¹ many scientists have chosen to ignore the poll because it is so obviously flawed. However, because its major claim has received such wide publicity, I decided a little further investigation was worthwhile.

Real Abductions or Sleep Paralysis?

The real issue raised by the Roper Poll is whether the 119 people who reported the indicator experiences had actually been abducted by aliens.

Since the sampling technique appears to be sound and the sample large, we can have confidence in the estimate of 2 percent claiming the experiences. The question is, Have these people really been abducted? The alternative is that they simply have had a number of interesting psychological experiences, the most obviously relevant being sleep paralysis. In this case, the main claim of the Roper Poll must be rejected. How do we find out?

I reasoned that people who have been abducted (whether they consciously recall it or not) should have a better knowledge of the appearance and behavior of aliens than people who have not. This leads to two simple hypotheses.

The Roper Poll assumes that people who have had the indicator experiences have probably been abducted. If this assumption is correct, people who report the indicator experiences should have a better knowledge of what aliens are supposed to look like and what happens during an abduction than people who do not report indicator experiences. If the assumption is not correct, then their knowledge should be no greater than anyone else’s -- indeed, knowledge of aliens should relate more closely to reading and television-watching habits than to having the indicator experiences if abductions do not really occur.

I decided to test this using both adults and children here in Bristol. It might be argued that genuine abductees wouldn't be able to remember the relevant details so I needed to use a situation that would encourage recall. I decided to relax the subjects and tell them an abduction story, and then ask them to fill in missing details and draw the aliens they had seen in their imagination.

Method

Subjects were 126 school children aged 8 to 13 and 224 first-year undergraduates aged 18 and over. The children came from two schools in Bristol. They were tested in their classrooms in groups of 22 to 28. The first group of 22 children had a slightly different questionnaire from the other groups and, is therefore, excluded from some of the analyses. The adults were psychology and physiotherapy students at the University of the West of England tested in three large groups. The procedure for the children is described below. The procedure was slightly simplified and the story slightly modified for the adults.

I first spent about half an hour talking to the children about psychology and research so that they got used to me. I then asked them to relax -- as much as they could in the classroom. Many laid their heads on the desks, some even lay down on the floor. I asked them to imagine they were in bed and being read a bedtime story. I suggested they try to visualize all the details of the story in their minds while I read it to them. I then read, slowly and clearly, a story called “Jackie and the Aliens,” in which a girl is visited in bed at night by a strange alien who takes her into a spacecraft, examines her on a table, and brings her back unharmed to bed. The story includes such features as traveling down a corridor into a room, being laid on a table, seeing alien writing, and catching a glimpse of jars on shelves. However, precise details are not given.

At the end of the story, I asked the children to “wake up” slowly and to try to remember as much as they could of the details of the story. I then handed out the questionnaires. Each questionnaire contained five multiple-choice questions about the alien, the room, and table; and the children were asked to describe what was in the jars and to draw the alien writing. There were also six questions based on those in the Roper Poll: Have you ever seen a UFO? Have you ever seen a ghost ? Have you ever felt as though you left your body and could fly around without it (an out-of-body experience, or OBE)? Have you ever seen unusual lights or balls of light in a room without knowing what was causing them, or where they came from? Have you ever woken up paralyzed, that is, with the feeling that you could not move? And, Have you ever woken up with the sense that there was a strange person or presence or something else in the room? (Note that in the Roper Poll, the question about paralysis was compounded with the question of the sense of presence. Here, two separate questions were asked. Note also that the last four of these questions were based on the indicator questions from the Roper Poll.) The questions were slightly altered to make them suitable for young children, and I did not ask about scars or missing time. A question about false awakenings (dreaming you have woken up) was also included, and two questions about television-watching habits.

Finally, all groups except one of the adult groups were asked to draw pictures of the alien they had imagined in the story.

Figure 1. Examples of a “gray” and several other imagined aliens, drawn by children aged 8 to 13.

Results

Large numbers of both adults and children reported having had most of the experiences. The percentages are shown in Table 1.

For each person, an “alien score” from 0 to 6 was given for the number of “correct” answers to the questions about the alien (that is, answers that conformed to the popular stereotype), and another score for the number of Roper Poll indicator experiences reported (0-4).

For the children, the mean alien score was 0.95, and the mean number of experiences 1.51. There was no correlation between the two measures (rs = - 0.03, n = 101, p = 0.78). The drawings of aliens were roughly categorized by an independent judge into “grays” and “others” (for almost all drawings the category is obvious; see Figure 1). Twelve (12 percent) of the children drew grays and 87 did not. Not surprisingly, those who drew a gray also achieved higher alien scores (t = 3.87, 97 df, p < 0.0001), but they did not report more of the experiences (t = 0.66, 95 df, p = 0.51).

Those children who drew grays did not report watching more television. Nor was there a correlation between the amount of television watched and the alien score (rs = 0.002, n = 101, p = 0.98). Oddly, there was a small positive correlation between the amount of television watched and the number of experiences reported (rs = 0.25, n = 101, p = 0.01).

For the adults, mean alien score was 1.23 and mean number of experiences 1.64. Again, there was no correlation between the two measures (rs = 0.07, n = 213, p = 0.29). Seventeen of the adults drew grays, and 103 did not. Again those who drew a gray achieved higher alien scores (t = 6.11, 118 df, p < 0.0001) but did not report more experiences (t = 0.14, 115 df, p = 0.89).

Among the adults, those who drew grays were those who watched more television (U = 534, n = 100, 17, p < 0.01), and the amount of television watched correlated positively with the alien score (rs = 0.20, n = 217, p = 0.003).

Discussion

These results provide no evidence that people who reported more of the indicator experiences had a better idea of what an alien should look like or what should happen during an abduction. If real gray aliens are abducting people from Earth, and the Roper Poll is correct in associating the indicator experiences with abduction, then we should expect such a relationship. Its absence in a relatively large sample casts doubt on these premises.

Among the adults (though not the children), there was a correlation between the amount of television they watched and their knowledge about aliens and abductions. This suggests that the popular stereotype is obtained more from television programs than from having been abducted by real aliens.

Our sample certainly included enough people who reported the indicator experiences. Although not all the indicator experiences were included, for the four questions that were used, the incidence was actually higher than that found by the Roper Poll. Presumably, therefore, many of my subjects would have been classified by Hopkins, Jacobs, and Westrum as having been abducted. The results suggest this conclusion would be quite unjustified.

These findings do not and cannot prove that no real abductions are occurring on this planet. What they do show is that knowledge of the appearance and behavior of abducting aliens depends more on how much television a person watches than on how many “indicator experiences” he or she has had. I conclude that the claim of the Roper Poll, that 3.7 million Americans have probably been abducted, is false.

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank the Perrott-Warrick Fund for financial assistance and Nick Rose for help with the analysis.

Note

1. For three earlier articles in the Skeptical Inquirer evaluating and strongly critiquing the interpretations of the Roper Poll, see Lloyd Stires, “3.7 Million Americans Kidnapped by Aliens?” 17 (2), Winter 1993; Philip J. Klass, “Additional Comments about the ‘Unusual Personal Experiences Survey',” 17 (2), Winter 1993; and Robyn M. Dawes and Matthew Mulford, “Diagnoses of Alien Kidnappings That Result from Conjunction Effects in Memory,” 18 (1), Fall 1993. All are reprinted in Kendrick Frazier, Barry Karr, and Joe Nickell, eds., The UFO Invasion, Prometheus Books, 1997.

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