UFO sighters: a down-to-Earth crowd.

UFO sighters: A down-to-Earth crowd

Welcome to the world of middle-class, no-nonsense, 9-to-5 citizens. While you're here, welcome to the ranks of those who typically report close encounters with unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and space aliens.

No available information supports such claims. Yet contrary to the suspicions of some researchers, people who cite UFO experiences prove neither psychologically disturbed nor especially fond of fashioning elaborate fantasies, according to a study in the November JOURNAL OF ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY.

UFO reports most often crop up among people who believe in the existence of UFOs, extraterrestrials, and other paranormal phenomena, such as reincarnation, assert Nicholas E Spanos, a psychologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, and his colleagues. These expectations apparently prime them to shape UFO episodes out of ambiguous events or unusual physical sensations that most often occur at night and in conjunction with a dream or sleep, the investigators contend.

Spanos and his co-workers studied 49 people - most holding white-collar jobs -- who described a UFO sighting or a closer otherworldly encounter, such as meeting a space alien or being taken away in a spaceship. Another 127 people citing no UFO run-ins served as controls.

The two groups showed about the same levels of intelligence, psychological health, hypnotizability, and tendency to fantasize, the researchers hold.

Those who sighted UFOs typically saw lights or shapes in the night sky that they interpreted based on their preexisting beliefs in the reality of UFOs and alien visitations, Spanos argues. Many of the more elaborate UFO encounters occurred in dreams mistakenly recalled as actual events, he says. Other accounts focused on the observer's inability to move and feelings of panic. These probably took place during sleep paralysis, a short period of total body paralysis than can occur just before nodding off or upon awakening, Spanos maintains. Sleep paralysis often triggers unusual sensations and hallucinations.

People hold many "counterfactual" beliefs that may sometimes spark supernatural interpretations of an event, Spanos says. "In particular, many people may have religious beliefs that provoke unusual sensory or visual experiences that they don't normally talk about."