Why People Believe Weird Things

“Alien abductions” are really the result of psychological and physical stress.

Stories of alien abductions are very widespread. How can so many witnesses be lying? Actually, they aren’t, it’s just that certain experiences can cause hallucinations that are so real that the affected person confuses reality and fantasy.

Many alien encounters are actually caused by not getting enough sleep. “White-line fever” is a sleep disorder that’s often experienced by truck drivers. Lack of sleep combined with the monotony of driving (and seeing the endless white lines on the road) leads to hallucinations, which can be quite extreme.

People who’ve experienced white-line fever report seeing bushes that turn into animals, or mailboxes that look like people. Of course, this sort of sleep deprivation can also lead to hallucinations about aliens.

Moreover, when people don’t know they’re hallucinating, these sightings get stored in their memory. Even after they recover, they remember the hallucinations as real experiences.

This is especially true when people report that they “remember” their alien encounter many years after experiencing it. This often happens under hypnosis, or after waking up at night.

These are simple explanations for this. During sleep or hypnosis, memory and fantasy can sometimes mix so much that it’s impossible to sort them out afterward.

Alvin Lawson, a psychologist, once put some students into a hypnotic state and told them they had been kidnapped by aliens. After the students woke up and were asked about their alien kidnapping, they could provide very detailed stories – all untrue.

Rare mental sleep states known as hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations also account for many alien reports. In these states, sleepers believe that part of their dreams are real in the first minutes after they wake, which is very disorienting. Psychologist Robert A. Baker, who analyzed these hallucinations, encountered many subjects who were convinced they had been carried away by martians.