By Gail Broli
The mainstream media coverage of alien abduction in the most part dismisses abductees as fantasists bored with their lives or attention seeking individuals. In fact many documentaries aired on mainstream tv channels are patronising and cruel to the individuals who put their trust and confidence in these production companies to tell their stories.
These such programmes give the public the image of the abductee frankly as being bonkers, or fantasy prone, individuals. This is where the realm of Psychology enters to try to quantify the abduction narrative. Whilst Elizabeth Loftus (1994) argued that Memories are malleable (in essence they can be false), that We choose what we remember to construct memories, that our sense of self can cope with. However, in the case of traumatic events our memories can become distorted and confusing triggering, PTSD, stress, depression, and anxiety.
Hypnotism which is used quite frequently to delve deeper into trauma has both advocates and those who strongly oppose it. Hypnotism does not seem to increase reports of alien abduction or indeed plant false memories. Rather Newman and Baumeister (1996) argue that false memories can be implanted in a variety of ways with or without the use of hypnosis in that some people are more naturally suggestible than others. Many peer reviewed studies only seem to concentrate on the alien abduction being related to false memories and or neurological disruption or issues. Some also state alien abductions are in fact the repressed traumatic memories from satanic or child sex abuse which to me is quite a far-reaching conclusion to explain every case of strange or distorted memory and which I think has very little credibility in modern psychological thinking.
Therefore, if we understand memories as being malleable and that suggestion can induce our memories, to recall events that may not occur or are questionable in those surroundings. It seems only logical to me that screen memories would be used in alien abductions so that the abductors could gain compliance from their abductees who as the term abductees implies are taken against their will! Could these screen memories be buried due to the fact that the mind or psyche is so frail or traumatised that our brain protects us from seeing something so incomprehensible it has no way of encoding this image. Other than matching it with something we already know and contains some sort of matching features with the actual creature or things that we are seeing?
Many screen memories include animals especially owls, wolves, cows, and deer that are somehow different to a normal animal, for example larger, or have deep or larger black eyes that are somehow hypnotic or attractive. The abductee may also describe the animal behaving oddly. Bud Hopkins concluded from his extensive research that too many abductees were sharing the same screen memory for it to be an independent memory created to protect the individual from trauma and that it was an implanted thought.
Could it be that the abductors are using classical fear conditioning in order to create new associations within the abductees brain? Screen memories seem to me to be an excellent way of gaining full compliance from a physically stronger species than themselves.
I feel that screen memories make sense, memory manipulation is an effective psychological tool that has been used for a long time and imagine with technology far beyond what we know what they can do with our brains and memories!
