Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens.ABDUCTED abducted Distal angulation of an extremity away from the midline of the body in a transverse plane and away from a sagittal plane passing through the proximal aspect of the foot or part, or away from some other specified reference point : How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens SUSAN A. CLANCY Polls suggest that more than 90 percent of people believe that extraterrestrials exist. A small but significant number of those people believe that they've been abducted by aliens. Clancy's graduate studies of human memory and, in particular, of so-called repressed memories repressed memory Psychology An event that occurred in a subject's past, the memory of which was actively repressed often because of the psychologically devastating impact of that memory–eg, childhood abuse, rape, molestation. Cf False memory, Source amnesia. led her to the much-maligned topic of alien abduction Abduction Balfour, David expecting inheritance, kidnapped by uncle. [Br. Lit.: Kidnapped] Bertram, Henry kidnapped at age five; taken from Scotland. [Br. Lit. and to a new understanding of the claimed abductees. The author found average, sane people who happen to have adopted the same peculiar belief to explain abnormal experiences. She examines why abduction stories tend to be so consistent, the effect of hypnosis hypnosis State that resembles sleep but is induced by a person (the hypnotist) whose suggestions are readily accepted by the subject. The hypnotized individual seems to respond in an uncritical, automatic fashion, ignoring aspects of the environment (e.g. and popular culture on abduction claims, and the sometimes-terrifying, sometimes-inspiring personal stories of people she interviewed. Clancy focuses not on whether her subjects were actually abducted but on why they believe they were. Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, 162 p., hardcover, $22.95. |
|
||||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion