(Note: Russ Estes, Bill Cone and I published a book called The Abduction Enigmaabout a decade ago. We saw it as a way of changing abduction research for the better by pointing out the weaknesses in the field. Of course we were attacked for our heresies and our suggestions were ignored. Instead other researchers asked for our demographics and wanted to know our methodologies. The following, originally published in The Anomalist, provided that specific information.)
In July, 1996, at the MUFON Symposium held in Greensboro, North Carolina, Budd Hopkins was disturbed by my paper about pop cultural influences on the imagery of alien abduction. He approached me and said, “You’re not an abduction researcher.” I reminded him that he used information about an abduction I had investigated in his first book on the topic. I have been investigating alien abductions since the mid-1970s and apparently before Hopkins started.
Four years later, that same comment was made, even after having published a number of articles on the topic, and having written two books about abduction. The second of those books, The Abduction Enigma, written with Russ Estes and Dr. William P. Cone, has created something of a fire storm, with many attacking without attempting to understand the reason the book exists.
Before moving on, it is necessary to provide some background information on both Estes and Cone. Estes, as a documentarian, has been investigating UFOs, and by default, alien abductions, since the late 1960s, which puts him ahead of most in the field today. He has interviewed and video taped literally hundreds of abductees and was responsible for some of the insights published in The Abduction Enigma.
Dr. Cone is a licensed psychological clinician with more than twenty years experience in the field. He has worked with, again literally, hundreds who believe that they have been abducted. Some of those believed the abduction was at the hands of worshipers of Satan, but dozens of others believed that they had been abducted by alien creatures. When we begin to talk of experience, as a psychologist and an abduction researcher, Cone has credentials that are as impressive as any of those working in the field today. Unlike some who gained their experience in the ivory towers of academia, Cone gained his experience in the field working with real people who had real problems.
Of course none of that means anything to the critics of our book. They simply begin attempting to pick apart some of our basic assumptions. For example, those believing that alien abductions are taking place have asked what is our definition of an abduction. They are attempting, I suppose, to understand the process we used to select the participants in our survey. The flip answer would be that we used the same definition that they used and the same people they used. It allows us to dodge the question without answering it.
The real answer is that our sample was taken from those who had been identified as abductees by others. That means that our sample was made up of those who were accepted as abductees and that we identified no one from the general population who hadn’t been accepted by the “mainstream” of abduction research. It means that the abductees were those identified by Hopkins, John Mack, John Carpenter, Yvonne Smith, Richard Boylan and so on. It means that we did not identify them as abductees but relied on the definition used by those others and the identification of those others. Therefore, as mentioned, abductees in our sample are the same as the abductees used by the other researchers.
The interesting thing here is that there seems to be no universal definition of who is an abductee. Jerry Clark, in the second edition of his The UFO Encyclopediawrote, “Abduction reports concern alien entities who capture humans from their bedrooms, vehicles, or open air, transport their captives inside a UFO, and subject them to a bizarre, sometimes painful physical examination before returning them to the capture site.” That seems to define the abduction event but not who, or what, an abductee actually is.
David Jacobs, in Secret Life provided a description of the typical abduction. He wrote, “An unsuspecting woman is in her room preparing to go to bed. She gets into bed, reads a while, turns off the light, and drifts off into a peaceful night’s sleep. In the middle of the night she turns over and lies on her back. She is awakened by a light that seems to be glowing in her room. The light moves toward her and takes the shape of a small ‘man’ with a bald head and huge black eyes. She is terrified. She wants to run but she cannot move. She wants to scream but she cannot speak… This is the typical beginning of an abduction.” Again, this addresses, more closely, what an abduction is as opposed to who is an abductee.
Raymond E. Fowler, in The Watchers, also tells us what an abduction is and provides a few clues about who the abductee is. He wrote, “…credible witnesses who claim not only to have observed but to have been taken abroad a UFO by alien creatures…the alleged abductee claims to have been examined and operated upon with foreign instruments. Almost always, communication is accomplished by telepathy.” By the way, I have seen no complaints about Fowler’s suggestion that communication is telepathic, and I have seen no one howling for demographic data to prove this bold assertion.
The closest that anyone comes, at least in the literature search I made, was from the “Abduction Code of Conduct” published in the Journal of UFO Studies. The authors wrote, “As there exist a number of possible causes for a reported abduction experience, investigators and MHPs [Mental Health Professionals] may work with individuals whose reported experiences stem from a variety of factors…abduction experiencer… simply indicates someone who reports experiences in their (sic) life which are consistent with, suggestive of, or thought to be associated with being ‘abducted’ (i.e., ‘carried or led away… in secret or by force,’) by apparently nonhuman entities.” What this suggests is that an abductee is anyone who reports that he or she is an abductee. It tends to validate our sample because those we used were those who reported they were abductees.
Unlike most of those other researchers, we did not advertize in the backs of books, or in magazines, or on radio programs, suggesting those with specific types of symptoms to write or call to expand our database. Those used in our survey were those who had been identified by other, the “true” abduction researchers. They were the ones who attended the UFO conferences, the symposiums, and the local, small meetings, and those who had joined one of the many abduction groups whose purpose was to gather to discuss abduction. Many of them were names that would be recognized by the UFO community including those who have appeared on television, those who have written their own books, and those who have been featured in the books of the abduction researchers. We defined our sample by who they were and who had hypnotically regressed them. The flippant answer turns out to be accurate because “our” abductees were the same as those interviewed by Hopkins, Mack, Jacobs, Carpenter and many of the other, lesser known researchers.
I might point out here that, somehow, the selection of abductees has been turned on its head. We used those only identified as abductees, yet the other researchers advertize for their clients. Their abductees are “selfselected.” Their sample is not random, by the strictest definition and that could skew their results.
The size of our sample was 316 individuals. They were selected because they claimed to have been abducted and “true” researchers had validated their claim. Today, for some reason, everyone is screaming for our demographics, though in the past no one really cared about these numbers, random sampling or even the scientific method.
In the last few months I read again that there is no psychopathology in the abduction population because Hopkins tested for it. What is rarely remembered is that Hopkins selected the sample, so it doesn’t seem to be random and it was only nine individuals. Hopkins has said that he has interviewed hundreds and hundreds of abductees since he began his research. This would mean that the data he presented about nine individuals who were not randomly sampled are invalid. The sample size was too small and not properly selected. Somehow those facts get missed most of the time.