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Chapter One
UFO ABDUCTIONS AND THE NATURE OF NARRATIVE
All books dealing with UFO abductions present their readers with something akin to a historical text, in that they maintain they are describing real events in the past. As is the case with a history book, in any abduction narrative the reader encounters a functional mix of the factual and the interpretive, the alleged facts of the abduction experiences, and, exerting an influence on the entire text, the author's interpretation of and response to those experiences. It is probably safe to say that, as far as the central or core events are concerned, exactly what happened will probably remain a mystery to everyone, including the abductees themselves, forever beyond unequivocal verification or refutation. Because we can never verify these core events, exactly how they are being conveyed in narrative form to the reading public is a crucial factor in determining public response.
As I mentioned in the preface, all books are, of course, in some sense "made up," in that the manner each event is presented to the reader is the result of decisions made by the author, and no two authors will express themselves in exactly the same way. Although many readers have trouble accepting this, it must be admitted that no facts are indelibly engraved in stone; rather, they come to the reader through the medium of written language, a medium that, as we shall see, is surprisingly fluid.
It must also be said that authors of abduction narratives employ many of the techniques of fiction, despite claiming that the events presented constitute historically precise records. This does not mean they are consciously fabricating untruths, but the demands of narrative leave them no choice to do otherwise. As the historian Hayden White has observed, the writing of history is not altogether different from the writing of fiction:
No given set of casually recorded historical events can in itself constitute a story; the most it might offer to the historian are story elements . The events are made into a story by the suppression or subordination of certain of them and the highlighting of others, by characterization, motific repetition, variation of tone and point of view, alternative descriptive strategies, and the like--in short, all of the techniques that we would normally expect to find in the employment of a novel or a play.
Obviously, if we accept the validity of White's contention (and it is pretty hard not to), it follows that writers of any kind of record of the past play a seminal role in how the story finally appears to the reader. We are at their mercy for those core events, because "we cannot go and look at them in order to see if the historian has adequately reproduced them in his narrative."
Hayden White makes another importantly related point: Historical narratives are "verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences." Literary critic Wallace Martin likewise observes the power of the narrator: "Between the story and the reader is the narrator, who controls what will be told and how it will be perceived." All authors (including myself) have an agenda, a point of view, and a thesis to promote, even though they may not always be consciously aware of that thesis themselves. In the interests of promoting their position, authors will exclude or minimize certain events which we might well consider as valuable to our understanding of the situation in question as is the information which the authors have chosen to put before us.
In the case of UFO abduction narratives, then, it is essential to keep in mind that we are not encountering objective scientific studies that many such books purport to be. Rather, we are confronted with an account of mysterious happenings that we can read only through the medium of the authors' biases that color their every utterance and are behind virtually every literary technique and strategy they employ. As we will see, even the most seemingly insignificant linguistic and rhetorical decisions made in the act of constructing a narrative are determined by those biases of the writer, and cumulatively contribute to how we will respond. Of course, to say this is not to say in turn that books about history are nothing more than a string of events manufactured through language alone; the vast majority of the events historians write about unquestionably occurred. Nor is it meant to imply that a writer's employment of literary strategies negates the value of the written discourse that ensues. As Wallace Martin again notes, such devices make discourse possible, indeed, they "create the possibility of narration. Without them, and confronted with a sheer mass of facts, the historian would have nowhere to begin."
But in the case of an experience as subjective and unverifiable as a recalled abduction experience, we are dealing with something that leaves absolutely no record of itself other than in the mind of the self-professed abductee. Given this, we are completely at the mercy not only of the abductees' frequently muddled memory, but also of the innumerable decisions that authors of the ensuing narratives have made in deciding how to convey the abductees' stories to the reader The point here is that the very need for the writer to "form a hypothesis concerning why something happened as it did" can be dangerous, insofar as "this hypothesis determines which facts will be examined and how they will be put together," to say nothing of that which will be discarded as immaterial or irrelevant to the author's purposes?
In the ensuing chapters, I hope to show more particularly how and why abduction authors' various strategies profoundly influence readers' responses to the events in question. In saying this, I do not, of course, mean to accuse the majority of authors of deliberately lying or cynically attempting to perpetrate hoaxes to mislead their readers for nefarious purposes. What I am saying is that, because of the nature of the abduction phenomenon and of narrative itself, all abduction narratives can be nothing more than highly speculative documents.
The Author's Role in Forming a Narrative
Abduction authors commonly reinforce an abductee's account by making extensive comments about his or her general reliability as a character. Sometimes the authors will make straightforward editorial declarations that are easy to identify. The credibility of such comments the reader can simply check against factual evidence adduced in the book in support of the abductee's stability. Often such confirmation is not hard to find, but in some cases a lack of supporting evidence will obviously weaken the author's claim.
On other occasions, the authors will label certain individuals in a manner that cannot help but create a favorable impression in the mind of the reader that may not in fact be warranted. In their discussion of the Villas-Boas case, for example (see the section titled "One Abduction, Many Versions," below), many commentators cited in support of Villas-Boas's credibility the fact that he refused to capitalize on his experience by selling his story to the press; presumably, as a man of integrity who had nothing to gain financially by fabrication, it followed that the story was more likely to be true. They also stressed the credentials of Villas-Boas's attending physician, Dr. Olavo Fontes, described in one account as "a distinguished local physician." Given this alleged distinction (in support of which, incidentally, no compelling verification was offered), when the doctor "concluded that [Villas-Boas] was completely truthful," subtle pressure is put on the reader to accept the experience he allegedly had.
We will encounter both of these techniques, and others more sophisticated and subtle, throughout abduction literature. Of course, in the above examples there is no necessary relationship between the credibility of the claims made and the professed stability of the persons making them. For one thing, we have no knowledge that Villas-Boas did not benefit in other respects (maybe he craved fame or notoriety, for instance). But another problem with such strategies is that they can backfire. For instance, if no corroborating evidence is produced to support the claim, say, of Dr. Fontes being "distinguished," readers may well dismiss it outright, and confront other claims made by the author with increased skepticism. Furthermore, if (as frequently happens) people who have been described as psychologically stable are subsequently perceived behaving inconsistently, the credibility not only of the character but of the author as well is called into question and can affect the reader's reception of this and subsequent information.
Unfortunately, many of us tend to think of written communication as a more or less straightforward process where facts are solid things passed from author to reader, and where the author writes from a vantage point where all is known and thus true. In this spirit, we tend to accept uncritically pretty much everything an author says about these facts, especially when we have been accustomed, or even actively encouraged, to equate the very fact of authorship with the notion of "authority" or "expertise." Consider in this regard the way many people are taught to read and respond to the Bible, for example, as a divinely inspired document every word of which is literally true and beyond challenge. When it comes to abduction literature, John Fuller actually knew and interviewed Betty and Barney Hill, and Budd Hopkins himself conducted innumerable hypnotic sessions with his many subjects. With this information constantly in mind, it is hard for many readers not to conclude that any questioning of their conclusions can only be presumptuous, given our distance from the events.
In fact, we have every right to dispute such claims, for despite the closer proximity of the authors to the abductees, they are really no closer to the core events than the reader is. Furthermore, despite their assertion that they were initially skeptical or at least noncommittal on the subject when they were first approached by an abductee (in itself an important strategic device that I will discuss), they are never detached or disinterested observers by the time their books have been published. Also, they frequently establish close relationships with the abductees, and come to play active roles in later proceedings such as the hypnotism sessions, which they often conduct themselves. It is understandable that such friendships between author and abductee would develop, and goes far toward explaining why they are usually so ready to accept more or less at face value an abductee's story. But it also does much to qualify their claims of objectivity.
Since there is no way authors of abduction narratives can count on readers being sufficiently credulous to accept the intrinsic events simply by virtue of being told it " really happened," other devices and techniques must be employed in the hope that, to the extent that they carry credibility in themselves, they may exert a favorable influence on our response to the abduction. Because the basic event from which everything flows--the abduction itself--flies in the face of most readers' sense of reality, making such an account convincing presents the writer with a formidable challenge. One way to achieve this is to present the material in a manner that is in many respects indistinguishable from those narratives we conventionally regard as purely true or realistic, such as newspaper accounts of commonplace events.
Wallace Martin observes that in order for a work to be considered realistic and hence believable, it must first contain material that "requires no justification because it seems to derive directly from the structure of the world," i.e., material such as names of cities and streets that we simply know to be true: "A narrative saturated with such details ... declares its allegiance to the real." Our sense that what we are reading is real is enhanced by our sense of how faithfully a writer has reproduced this surface texture of what we loosely call "everyday life" (what the weather was like the night the abduction took place or what was on TV, for example).
It is, then, no surprise to see how frequently realistic details are inserted in the description of the abduction itself. Indeed, it is arguable that the presence of such details is the most important factor in determining the strength of a narrative's claim to credibility. As we shall see, no matter how fantastic are the experiences being described, we are never allowed to forget that the events are taking place in a context that purports to be as real as the reader's living room. A bond between reader and abductee---or the illusion of one--is subtly formed in this manner.
The likelihood that the reader will not dismiss an abduction account out of hand can also be increased by making sure that the laws of cause and effect are seen to be operating, much as we perceive them to be working in our own lives. To achieve this, authors make sure that their stories conform to our sense of logical sequence, that is, to our knowledge of the "series of events involved in thousands of different activities--going to a restaurant, taking a trip," or visiting the doctor or dentist. Realism demands that the writer adhere to these conventions in order for the narrative to be considered "true-to-life."
Proof that structural coherence in a narrative is a crucial factor in determining how it will be received can be found in Bernard S. Jackson's essay "Narrative and Legal Discourse," a discussion of a revealing experiment conducted by two lawyers, W.L. Bennett and M. S. Feldman. Their experiment was designed to determine which factors were most influential in causing a jury to find a narrative credible. "Their hypothesis was that the construction of truth within the courtroom was primarily a matter of the overall narrative plausibility of the story told." What they discovered was "that it is not the weighing of individual elements of the story ... which renders a case persuasive or not, but rather the plausibility of the story structure taken as a whole." The experiment involved two groups of students, one telling a mock jury true stories, the other false ones. "Their results indicated no statistical association between the actual truth status of stories and their perceived truth status. Moreover, they found that the structure of a story had a considerable impact on its credibility; as structural ambiguities in stories increased, credibility decreased, and vice versa." The authors of the experiment also noted "the importance of the confidence of witnesses as a factor in credibility, and the use of qualifications (e.g., of expert witnesses) in order to validate testimony."
What all this means is simply that if a story appears coherent, seems to have logical sequence to its events, contains certain recognizable consistencies, and is endorsed by authorities, it tends to be believed whether it is true or not. As we will see, the above is most relevant to our investigation, for it not only explains why most abduction narratives are so tightly structured, but also goes far toward explaining why they rely so extensively on the views and endorsements of "experts," even though strictly speaking, the experts are no closer to the material than the reader.
Another time-honored method used by writers to strengthen our sense of a story's credibility lies in involving--or appearing to involve -the reader directly in the primary facts of the case. Writers of abduction narratives often draw considerable attention to the accuracy of individuals' memories even in minor matters, and will present detailed accounts of failed attempts to trick abductees into making inconsistent statements in their testimony while under hypnosis. This may also explain why so many of them (John Fuller, Raymond Fowler, and Budd Hopkins, in particular) tend to reproduce at length actual transcripts of the hypnotized subjects. Letting the abductees articulate their experiences in their own words--as they appear to be doing--supposedly presents the strongest case for their credibility, and it serves as well to draw readers directly into the action, as it were, enhancing the illusion that we are actually on the scene of the hypnosis session as the abductee was reliving the experience.
In order to give the abduction story as much credibility as possible, other literary devices are also employed. Readers must not only believe in the abductee's stability and sincerity; they must also be convinced that the author, who plays a central role as narrator, is a person who can be trusted. Often a reference will be made to the "decency" and "integrity" of the author in an introduction or preface written by a presumably objective third party who often possesses impressive academic credentials. Once this has been accomplished, the author's subsequent comments concerning an abductee's integrity or that of anyone else connected with the story will be made with greater authority. The motive behind the use of this device is the hope that all the characters' authenticity will "rub off" on the abduction account and render it more believable, even though the two categories of events are not really related at all.
Of course, abduction authors also emphasize their own attention to detail, stressing those times when they consulted weather reports or astronomical charts in order to verify that the atmospheric conditions (temperature, clear or cloudy skies, etc.) were as the abductee recalled, or that the stars in the sky did square with the abductee's recollections. But for all their attempts to convince us of their scrupulous fidelity to accuracy, there is really nothing in an abductee's memory of a given evening--no matter how accurate it might be--that increases the likelihood that the recalled abduction took place.
Abduction authors are fond of emphasizing the high degree of consistency that can be found within the abductees' various recollections over lengthy periods of time of their abduction experiences, which they frequently tout as compelling proof of the stories' truth. Interestingly enough, to the degree that this may be true, such consistency can be used as evidence against the stories' literal truth. Events experienced in real life rarely repeat themselves with exactitude. Fantasies, however, have a structural completeness peculiar to themselves by virtue of being fiction, and are for this reason more likely to be recalled in exactly the same way any number of times.
Incidentally, on the matter of consistency, the authors also make much of the extensive similarities that they allege can be seen among separate abduction accounts. In fact, abduction stories are riddled with inconsistencies, and contain elements many of which are mutually exclusive. As later chapters will reveal, this tendency to minimize discrepancies and distinctions has resulted in claims being made on behalf of a general "consistency down to the most minute details" among abduction reports that the actual evidence simply does not support. Significantly, on those rare occasions when inconsistencies from account to account are too glaring to be ignored, they are usually dismissed as trifling, minor variations of no consequence.
In cases where multiple or repeated abductions have happened to the same person, authors make every effort to stress the extent to which accounts of the separate experiences are similar, or in some cases form part of a discernible pattern of purposeful behavior on the aliens' part. In fact, as will become apparent, the resemblances one encounters from account to account may say more about the nature of a realistic narrative's inner logic than anything else, and the apparent patterns may be as much the product of hindsight as anything else.
All in all, in spite of the presence of these conventional indicators of truth, the reader should not forget that they are not sufficient in themselves to guarantee that what is being alleged really occurred. After all, some of the most realistically presented fictions have been the purest of fantasies, and readers of abduction narratives would do well to keep this in mind.
One Abduction, Many Versions
At this stage of the discussion some readers may be wondering if the extent of the authors' power over their material is not being overemphasized. That even authors without obvious bias can leave their unique stamps on material will become apparent from the following case study, which provides a striking illustration of how writers, consciously or otherwise, can guide the reader's responses. Indeed, this case typifies in condensed form what I discovered was taking place on a larger scale in the abduction volumes. Although in this instance the variations are relatively minor, it is plain that all of the writers concerned have brought to the subject a distinct approach, and that the finished results--the narratives themselves--are far from identical.
It will be recalled from the introduction that the Antonio Villas-Boas abduction case of 1957 was one of the first to receive publicity on a wide scale. Because the point of this exercise is not to rank the authors in relation to how closely their paraphrases approximated the original, but merely to demonstrate variation among the accounts, the Villas-Boas testimony need not concern us particularly here. The case involved the forcible abduction of Villas-Boas, a young Brazilian farm worker who claimed to have been taken aboard a UFO one night by a group of five alien beings. Once inside the craft, he was stripped and washed, following which a female alien entered the room and had sex with him. After this, his clothes were returned to him and he was released. Villas-Boas's testimony was duly transcribed and translated into English by Professor Olavo Fontes, a physician who examined Villas-Boas extensively. I chose at random five summaries of this case: Thomas Bullard's 1982 Ph.D. dissertation "Mysteries in the Eye of the Beholder," Jenny Randles's Abduction (1988), Keith Thompson's Angels and Aliens (1991), Jacques Vallee's Dimensions (1988), and Timothy Good's Alien Contact (1991, 1993). All the authors are well-known UFO researchers, and all are writers of considerable experience. In the course of my investigation, I discovered many variations from summary to summary, some of them minor, others less so. All contained their own peculiar omissions and/or insertions, and some statements were made which were outright contradictions of each other. Though the writers remain faithful to the substance of the account, the variations are particularly striking when one considers that all five researchers presumably had access to identical source material: the original testimony of Villas-Boas himself as it appeared in translated form. Another interesting feature of the variations is that of the five, four were published within three years of each other (two in 1988, two in 1991).
Bullard's account appears in table form (where it is set against eleven other abductions), although it is buttressed with occasional comments on the case in the accompanying text of his thesis. He makes no reference to Villas-Boas's age (he was twenty-three), nor does he precisely define his occupation (he was a farmer working for his father). The fact that Villas-Boas claimed to have seen UFOs on previous occasions is not stated, nor is mention made of the aliens' growling or barking language. Since this is very unusual behavior for aliens, if not unique as far as contact cases go, one would think it deserved mention if only for its singularity. In spite of the fact that the seduction of Villas-Boas is obviously the most sensational (and fantastic) aspect of the case, Bullard provides no details of the actual encounter, and his failure to describe the physical features of the female alien, combined with his comment in the thesis's text that "the occupants which captured Villas-Boas were almost human," minimizes those physical differences that Villas-Boas did describe (they spoke like dogs, in barks; had light-colored eyes smaller than ours; and their heads were double the size of a human's, judging by the size of their helmets). At the same time, of the five summaries Bullard's is the only one to mention the bad-smelling gas in one of the rooms that made Villas-Boas physically ill, and only Bullard alludes to his having been taken to three rooms.
Jenny Randles describes Villas-Boas as a "Brazilian cowhand" and gives the date of the encounter as recorded in the original transcript as "1:00 A.M. on 16 October 1957." Bullard, incidentally, mentioned the evening of the fifteenth, but provided no information as to when the actual abduction took place. Randles, alone of the five, correctly gives the aliens' height at "about five feet tall," but she describes Villas-Boas as being given "a rubdown" where other accounts (Bullard and Thompson) more accurately describe his being coated with a strange thick liquid prior to his sexual encounter. To Randles, the alien sexual partner was not quite as normal-looking, but was a "peculiar-looking woman... [who] had fair skin, high cheekbones, Oriental eyes, and red hair." In fact, Villas-Boas described her as "beautiful, though of a different type from the women I had known." Furthermore, she had "fair, almost white" hair, and eyes he associated with those of "Arabian [ not oriental] princesses." Only her armpit and pubic hair was red.
For his part, Keith Thompson notes that Villas-Boas was not simply a farmer, but an "uneducated" one, a fact corroborated in Dr. Fontes's covering comments. Thompson also mentions the three legs which "descended from the hovering craft to support it," fixes the time and date at 1:00 A.M. on October 14 (rather than the 16th), and has the aliens suitably "helmeted [and] humanoid" rather than human, unlike the other accounts which, in making no mention of helmets and other unusual distinguishing features, imply that the aliens were not markedly different from ourselves. For the first time we are told that a blood sample was taken before the sexual encounter occurred (in the transcript two were taken, oddly enough from his chin), and we have the first reference to the barking sounds emitted by all the aliens, which Thompson correctly informs us that Villas-Boas found "repulsive." In Thompson we learn that the female alien was not a redhead; only her pubic hair was "bright red." We also are given some details of the sexual encounter, but hear nothing of the clocklike device Villas-Boas attempted unsuccessfully to take from the UFO, an event that appears only in Bullard and Vallee. Thompson, however, is alone in making a good deal of the physical after-effects suffered by Villas-Boas which were corroborated by Dr. Fontes. But even here, only Randles informs us that Fontes "examined the farmer in his Rio office in early 1958," a fact of some importance considering that much could have happened to Villas-Boas in the intervening months.
Jacques Vallee's account has the aliens communicating "among themselves in slowly emitted growls" rather than grunts or barks, and omits reference to the three-legged feature of the UFO or to the dress of the aliens. Vallee describes the female alien as simply having "blonde" hair, "with a part in the center," unlike Randles's redhead and Good's "bleached" alien. Only Vallee mentions that "She was much shorter than he was, her head only reaching his shoulder." In the other accounts, no mention whatever was made of her height and none is made of Villas-Boas's (himself only five feet four inches tall). Vallee makes no mention of the details of the sexual episode, but he is the only one to mention her parting smile.
Timothy Good prudently provides us with no precise date of the occurrence, claiming only that "Antonio Villas-Boas was apparently twice seduced by a four-and-a-half-foot tall alien female aboard a spaceship in October 1957." Now the aliens are not simply helmeted, but "space-suited humanoids," and his female companion is revealed to have "very fair, almost bleached hair reaching halfway down her neck"; only her pubic (and armpit) hair are "very red." Quoting Villas-Boas directly on the effect the alien's grunting ( not barking, as Thompson claimed) had on him while they had sex, we learn he received only "the disagreeable impression that [he] was with an animal," but did not find this behavior "decidedly repulsive" as Thompson claimed. Although Good and others make note of the alien partner's pointing to the sky after the encounter was over, only Vallee describes in any detail subsequent events such as the tour of the UFO. Finally, Vallee's is the only account which bothers to mention the length of time the experience allegedly took (over four hours, from approximately 1:00 A.M. to 5:30 A.M.).
Obviously, the above has only touched on the differences visible among the researchers' paraphrasings of this well-known abduction case. What we have just observed is an isolated, but far from atypical, example of something that takes place in every narrative act. One can never narrate without making decisions to highlight certain elements while minimizing others; what we have observed constitutes a most basic and perhaps unavoidable act of editorial involvement on the authors' parts with the original material. Nor is this simply a petty or pedantic question of "style," or of our being presented with different but equally valid ways of saying the same thing. In each case, the authors have ranked raw material on the basis of its perceived importance and relevance as they conceived it, in a manner that can have a significant effect on the reader. To take only two examples, it is arguable that Thompson's use of the word "uneducated" in his initial description of Villas-Boas might negatively affect a reader's assessment of his credibility, and other readers might be distanced by Villas-Boas's own boastful comment, quoted directly, that the aliens saw in him "'a good stallion to improve their own stock.'" Timothy Good's detailed description of Villas-Boas's illness following the abduction, together with his observation that Dr. Fontes "concluded that he was completely truthful," may help establish sympathy for him. In short, even though such decisions may be barely visible, their effect is far from negligible. One simply cannot escape the fact that without the original document the reader has no way of knowing which summary is to be trusted, and can only conclude that the validity of all is questionable. As ensuing chapters will demonstrate, despite all the claims the authors make on behalf of the accounts' consistency, variations abound from narrative to narrative, making any response but an undecided one all but impossible for the discerning reader.
Copyright © 1998 Terry Matheson. All rights reserved.
