Of Alien Abductions and Sleep Paralysis

Photo by Luz A. Villa

You wake up in the middle of a night. There are unusual flashes of light and a buzzing or a humming sound. Feelings of anxiety and fear take over you as you sense the presence of an unexplained being in the room. All of a sudden your chest feels heavy and you start having trouble breathing. You try to move, but you find yourself completely paralyzed except for your eyes. Your body starts to levitate … How would you respond?

If you have been exposed to enough popular media, you would probably think that you were experiencing a paranormal phenomenon; out-of-body experiences, ghosts, demonic encounters, poltergeists, and aliens… But in fact there is another, more plausible, explanation. Scientist point out the similarities between such enigmatic incidents and sleep paralysis.

During a typical sleep paralysis episode, a person wakes up fully conscious but without the ability to move for a few minutes, which can cause an intense feeling of fear, even terror. The person also experiences hypnagogic hallucinations, generally vivid and unpleasant, which occur at the onset of sleep or before awakening. In this paralyzed state between sleep and consciousness, the imagined aliens and demons will seem extremely real. This experience alone may be enough to create the feeling of having been abducted or possessed. Hypnosis, guided imagery, regression, and relaxation therapies could all make the memories of this real experience (but not real abduction) completely convincing, by lulling the “abductee” into a suggestive state.

It is not clear when sleep paralysis was first noted as a sleeping disorder, but the phenomenon seems to underlie common myths such as witch or hag riding in England, the Old Hag of Newfoundland, Kanashibari (literally meaning: "bound or fastened in metal") in Japan, and Karabasan in Turkey, among others. During the Medieval times, women who were pregnant, but not married, would often accuse an incubus, a demon which supposedly would lie upon sleepers in order to have sexual intercourse with them. This feeling of being smothered whilst sleeping has been known since the ancient times as a nightmare. While in our modern age, we choose not to believe in such fairy tales anymore, there are nearly four million Americans who claim that they have had certain indicator experiences and therefore had probably been abducted by aliens. According to a Gallup poll done at the end of the twentieth century, about one-third of Americans believe aliens have visited us, an increase of 5% over the previous decade. It seems that alien abductions are the contemporary sleep paralysis myths.

Of course just because people believe that they are being visited by aliens doesn’t mean that they are mentally ill. In fact, a study done in 1993, which compared forty-nine UFO reporters with two control groups, found that they were no less intelligent, no more fantasy prone, and no more hypnotizable than the controls. So why are people so susceptible to believing in something incongruous with reason, such as alien abductions? The answer is simple. William J. Cromie from Harward News Office explains, “Some people become so absorbed by what happened and seek an explanation of it. That can lead them into a grab of different techniques well known to those with a rich fantasy life and a distaste for scientific explanations.”


On a side note: If aliens actually arrived on earth to abduct our most successful inhabitant they would look to bacteria. By any criteria which you can judge a successful inhabitant bacteria would win hands down in terms of profusion, diversity, and the ability to live under extraordinary circumstances; even we entirely depend upon them to survive.