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“In the stories here, history bumps up against inchoate experiences of the body and its encounters with inscrutable forces”
When I was a child I was terrified of aliens. I don’t know where it began, but they were ubiquitous enough in pop culture that I came to generally understand the tropes and trends around alien abductions and mysterious sightings and they distressed me to no end; the cartoon UFOs beaming up cows out of fields, the alien abductions and medical experimentation on TV shows that gave me nightmares, stories of extraterrestrial parasites hosted on earth, the alien autopsies on the covers of those weird tabloid magazines on grocery store racks.
I can’t say exactly what so fascinated and terrified me about these stories. The fear of the unknown, I guess, and the unknowable. The danger, of course, and the fear of the familiar being permeated by the other, the anxieties we have about our lack of control in the world being funnelled into something specific that we can name.
The fear of creatures from outer space, and all things Alien, is simple and terrible. It tells us a basic truth: the universe is large and incomprehensible and it is all out of our hands.
The abduction of Betty and Barney Hill is one of the first famous stories in what is now a broader alien abduction phenomena.1 It has many of the hallmarks of these stories: there are extraterrestrials with telepathic communication, there is a UFO like a flying saucer, the two return home and experience strange memories and dreams, there are astrological connections, and broken watches and missing time. It is 1961 and the interracial couple leave a diner in Vermont late at night. They are already exhausted but they agree to make the multi hour drive home, where they should arrive well after two in the morning. Hours later on the road they are sleep deprived and frightened and they see a strange light. They want to go home.
Betty and Barney spoke of seeing aliens and tried to fill in the blanks of the time they lost while under hypnosis, as many abductees and contactees do. In these sessions they recalled strange beings, an abduction onto a ship, a stellar map. There has been a lot of research into these stories, into the difficulties and outright dangers of hypnotic suggestion and recovered memories associated with hypnosis as a therapeutic technique, into the numerous possible(and very reasonable) alternate explanations for the experiences of alien abduction.2 But these stories are still told, and people suffer because of their experiences. Simultaneously, they have gained a foothold in popular culture, in television and films and more, and every once in a while UFO disclosure or strange sightings get discussed again in mainstream news, and we can’t help but feel drawn back into their mystery.
Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore is a magical realist novel filled with metaphysics and dream logic and puzzles, and the first challenge it sets readers is this: it is the middle of world war ii and a group of children evacuated to the countryside are sent out with their teacher to forage atop a nearby mountain.3 The children see something strange, shiny in the sky - and each one of them loses consciousness. Hours pass. They’re missing time, they do not come back the same.
The story is imbued with a surreal, mystical quality, and this opening narrative echoes many accounts of alien contact. Within the novel, the answers to this and other mysteries of liminal, otherworldly experiences have more complicated answers, but the resonance remains. The most uncanny tales follow certain patterns, and it is this union of the unknown and the familiar that is the most strange.
Certain details from Betty and Barney’s testimonies under hypnosis have been directly connected to science fiction TV episodes aired in 1964 in the weeks prior to their hypnotic regressions, as well as prominent imagery from the 1953 film Invaders from Mars.4 What was it that they were recalling during those sessions? Where do the images of memory come from?
Science fiction is at its core a genre that reveals and explores humanity and human experience through its storytelling. The conventions of futuristic technology or space exploration or dystopian and utopian far futures all ultimately point back to the contemporary social reality that imagines them. Evidence suggests that stories of alien contact draw directly, whether consciously or subconsciously, from sci fi and pop culture. William J. Dewan considers the role that these cultural inputs influence the reconstruction of memory, suggesting that
“the UFO as an extraterrestrial craft reflects a contemporary American fascination with alien life… Moreover, witnesses of such seemingly extraordinary phenomena will inevitably be drawn to extraterrestrial explanations in pursuit of what Ellis describes as a "convenient cultural language"5 for phenomena that a rationalist paradigm would allow as solely the result of misperception, hoax, or insanity.”6
This cultural vocabulary is complicated by the fact that many works of science fiction engage with contactee memorates as a point of reference in depicting the possibilities for alien contact or abduction. Betty and Barney’s story has inspired film and television retellings. The X-Files deals frequently with the mythos of abductee stories, with its pilot episode following an investigation into claims of alien abduction.7 Star Trek: The Next Generation is a show already full of alien characters, but perhaps its most unsettling are the unseen extraterrestrials of the episode “Schisms”, who abduct sleeping crew members of the Enterprise to perform medical experiments.8 The iconography and patterns of abduction accounts appear all over television and elsewhere.9 Fiction and experience become mutually informative and remain in dialogue in often contested and challenging ways. The stories that result are buried under layers of narrative and meaning and cultural memory.
![According to literature professor Terry Matheson, the popularity and intriguing appeal of alien abduction accounts are easy to understand. Tales of abduction "are intrinsically absorbing; it is hard to imagine a more vivid description of human powerlessness". Matheson says that after experiencing the frisson of delightful terror one may feel from reading a ghost story or watching a horror film, people "can return to the safe world of their homes, secure in the knowledge that the phenomenon in question cannot follow. But as the abduction myth has stated almost from the outset, there is no avoiding alien abductors."[5]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!p37V!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa1989040-4b96-4721-9908-03c59c0e3fd4_950x178.png "According to literature professor Terry Matheson, the popularity and intriguing appeal of alien abduction accounts are easy to understand. Tales of abduction \"are intrinsically absorbing; it is hard to imagine a more vivid description of human powerlessness\". Matheson says that after experiencing the frisson of delightful terror one may feel from reading a ghost story or watching a horror film, people \"can return to the safe world of their homes, secure in the knowledge that the phenomenon in question cannot follow. But as the abduction myth has stated almost from the outset, there is no avoiding alien abductors.\"[5]")
In the latest Studio Ghibli film, The Boy and the Heron, a young boy deals with the trauma of his mother’s death and the ongoing second world war as he and his father move to a family home in the countryside, along with his new step-mother.10
After the loss of his mother, the boy moves to an unfamiliar place, stops attending school, falls out of step with the passage of time and with life as he knew it before. This out of step-ness, perhaps, is what allows him to enter the strange fantasy world of the film, where his experiences become interwoven with magic and danger and a world constantly slipping out of place. He disappears into it.
His grieving process is violent, terrifying(as it must be). Along his journey he is able to reconnect with memories of his mother and her own time living in this house and visiting the mystical other world he encounters. We learn that his mother, too, disappeared in her youth, that she lost time, returning with no memories. Both characters encounter something beyond this world, but this is a story where they return more connected. The boy’s journey allows him to process the devastating losses he has endured and to return to his present life and rejoin his family in their new home.
The disappearance is transformative. At its simplest, how different is the average alien encounter from fantasy? Or other folkloric tellings of contact with the extra-ordinary worlds of spirits or fairies? Is it just a question of genre?
The terrifying encounter with the unknown could just as easily be a tale of transformation and hope. Research suggests that communities of abductees increasingly view experiences of alien contact with positive associations.11 Even among or beyond the trauma and terror of abduction there are also recurring tales of optimism and connection gained through these experiences.
In college, I did research projects on “UFO cults”—new religious movements that incorporate extraterrestrial beings, cosmic communications, or otherworldly experiences into their belief systems—for a few religious studies courses. To this day I’m on the mailing list for several active groups that I engaged with then, and every week I get emails with subject lines like “UFOs and Their Spiritual Message”12 and “Jesus is from Venus”.13 These are groups that see the otherworldly as a source of incredible hope and transcendence. As much as the UFO is a haunting icon of unresolved traumas and repressed anxieties, it can equally be a religious symbol, “a marvelously affirming sign of God”14
I don’t think I’ve ever met an alien, and I don’t think that I believe in aliens, really, or at least not in the way we’re talking about here. Like, I don’t believe that Grey Aliens or Little Green Men are out there, or that the extraterrestrials that frightened me in childhood(the Alien from Alien, the silurians15 from Doctor Who, Xemu from Scientology16, and many others.) are real. I do think that it is more likely than not that life exists outside of Earth. And, of course, I’ve seen UFOs, but this is due mainly to my general inability to identify flying objects. The feeling of the uncanny is the feeling that Things Are Not Right. In spite of all my better judgment, I believe in the possibilities that reside in that not quite right uncanny space. Still, I don’t think that makes me a believer.
But there is something very sympathetic in the stories of aliens and of abductees, a ring of truth. I recognise the strangeness. I understand the sense of disruption, the mysterious headaches, the days we cannot account for, waking up in the night and feeling lost, the unexplainable bruises and the pit in the stomach. We could find names for these things(names like false memory, or sleep paralysis), and explanations(hypnotic suggestion, dissociation, cultural input), but their vagueness and mystery is essential somehow, in stories that drift somewhere outside of the borders of reality or fiction, to the hope of finding something true amidst the slipperiness of experience, memory, and dream.
Abductee stories nearly always incorporate some element of medical horror or clinical procedure, so much so that it has become considered one of the essential components of such narratives. The experiences of abduction, captivity, and the body are inextricable. Like how the only thing I could think about before I lost consciousness in the operating theatre was how closely the room resembled those alien ships that I used to read about in abductee accounts; the bright lights and unearthly white of the surfaces, and the collapse of sense and time, and that I wanted to go home. Or how sometimes, when the pain that comes and goes comes once again I feel that fear—what do I not know? What isn’t right here? I can explain these experiences, I know exactly why and how they happened, yet still I understand that feeling that lingers of something lost. Lost memory, lost time, lost understanding, lost control. There is so much in our bodies and minds that is unexplained and unexplainable. The world, too. That mystery is everything, and it is terrifying; we search for patterns and explanations, whatever we can find, to try and transcend that.
Picnic at Hanging Rock, a 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay tells the mystifying story of Appleyard College, an Australian girl’s school in 1900, and the three students and teacher who go missing during an excursion to the titular Hanging Rock(Ngannelong17).18 The story, which is presented as if it were a true historical event, is deeply uncanny, filled with strange occurences that go unexplained and unsolved yet are tied together by resonances and mysteries that circle always back to the day of the disappearance at Hanging Rock, where time and experience are warped. People disappear without a trace, watches stop working.
The narrative voice of the novel refers to this frequently as the “pattern” of Hanging Rock and what becomes known in public discussion as the College Mystery. This pattern ties the disappearance to the collapse of Appleyard College, and to the various calamities and deaths that follow these events. The pattern unfolds, spreading outward from the point of contact of the Hanging Rock, where white Australian girls in formal Edwardian dress climbed over the rocky paths of a colonised Australian landscape, its indigenous name and history erased. Underneath the uncanny and the unknown that drives the story of the Hanging Rock pattern are these unspoken histories of empire and colonial force, and as the pattern shows us throughout the story, there is no resolution, only further destruction. The pattern loops back on itself in warped time, always back to the picnic and to the place and people left behind and to what is irrecoverable.
At a certain point, the story isn’t the thing that matters. The story isn’t the story, but the pattern it follows. Susan Lepselter writes about this in her account of a UFO contactee community in The Resonance of Unseen Things.19 Describing the narratives shared by members of the community, Lepselter considers the way that things like repetition and cyclical logic appear in their stories and serve to reemphasize the teller’s experiences:20
The stories of UFOs always reveal certain truths, but not always quite what we expect. They are stories of anxieties or trauma or transcendence, and whether or not you believe in aliens, there is clearly something lingering in the memorates of contact, something that continues to haunt.
One of the most moving and compelling elements of the alien story is the deeply human force at its centre. More moving to me in the story of the Hills’ abduction is not the hypnosis or the descriptions of alien figures, but the earthly details - they see something from the car, they know something is wrong when they get home because their clothes and shoes are damaged and scuffed. In a contactee interview, Lepselter is told that the reptilian aliens who would visit a man’s home like to play Scrabble with him:
It was a shock of the mundane into the unearthly, and yet Scrabble was, in a sense, a fitting emblem of uncanny poetics, each letter potentially doubling from one word to bleed into the next, building up in ways both arbitrary and designed.21
It is these little details that allow the stories to burst through into reality, connecting the otherworldly to the everyday material world. In an early chapter of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, a character visits a new planet for the first time and his initial experience is not one of awe or amazement like we might envision, but instead of illness: he has an allergic reaction to the alien substances he is suddenly exposed to, and spends his first days in this wondrous new place recovering. This detail sticks with me, small as it is, because of how much it grounds the story in a real sense of bodily experience. Elsewhere across the narratives patterned around alien encounters we find these little details again and again, drawing us into and grounding us in the body and on the earth in the face of the transcendent.
But these elements of mundanity are not the only way in which alien stories are so human. Social and cultural forces hidden under the surface play a major role in the patterns of abduction and contact. The Resonance of Unseen Things connects these stories to the traumatic histories buried in the American psyche - colonisation, the genocide of indigenous peoples, transatlantic slavery. Lepselter writes of the multifaceted experiences that play into the process of narrativising the uncanny:
Linked up with the variable infinite experience of class, race, gender and loss, it is the parallels between these stories about power that become the subject of many uncanny stories. The original stories of historical trauma don’t always make it up for air. (If they did, they would no longer haunt.)
Instead, the uncanny story itself is about the resemblances between the unspoken originals. The urge toward apophenia begins to resonate and hum. And that resonance is something to notice too, because it is a story of power on its own.22
I don’t know exactly what brought me to all of this. I haven’t studied UFO contact or cults since I graduated, haven’t obsessively read accounts of accounts like the Hills’ in years, haven’t thought of my childhood fascination with the extraterrestrial in even longer—but it all comes back, like a memory resurfacing, like something lost returning.
The point of any abduction story is the return to the world: without the return there is no teller, and the paradigm of the alien contact narrative is one of both departure and regression. It loops in on itself, warps time.
I don’t know exactly what it is but I’m at a bit of a crossroads in my life right now, and I think that’s what brought me here. The future is murky and full of known unknowns23. Nothing about this is really that strange considering I’m in my mid twenties and trying to figure out all the associated Life Stuff(and, notably, this is because I am privileged to have options and opportunities open to me), but it is nevertheless terrifying to stare into the void of the future and know that in a few months time everything about my life might be different. My future self feels like a complete mystery.
The fear I am facing is the same one as always, something that scares us all (at least a little): the simple fear of the unknown. I want mysteries to be solved, I want rational explanations, I want a clear path in my life, I want the world to make sense. But we do not tell these stories to solve the mystery or to find some great truth. The point of the story is the questions that remain: what happened in that lost time, why did the watches stop, what comes next? What lies beyond and when will we come home to tell the story?
thank you for reading! i just reached my first milestone of 100 subscriptions and am so grateful but also shocked that so many people have read these newsletters! when i started writing here, my audience was just me and I never really expected it to go anywhere, and (while i’m still not here trying to get substack famous or anything,) i am so honoured that you’ve taken the time to read or share or provide feedback on what i write here. seriously, thank you <3
from another world,
isobel
Lacina, Linda (January 15, 2020). "How Betty and Barney Hill's Alien Abduction Story Defined the Genre". History. Archived from the original on July 8, 2023.
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore, translated by Philip Gabriel, Harvill: London, 2005. Originally published in Japan in 2002.
Jason Colavito (2014). "Alien abduction at... The Outer Limits". jasoncolavito.com.
Ellis, Bill. 1988. The Varieties of Alien Experience. Skeptical Inquirer 12(3):263-9. . 1991. Cattle Mutilation: Contemporary Legends and Contemporary Mythologies. Contemporary Legend 1:39-80, as quoted by Dewan.
William J. Dewan. “‘A Saucerful of Secrets’: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of UFO Experiences.” The Journal of American Folklore 119, no. 472 (2006): 196. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4137923.
“Pilot”, The X-Files, Season 1 episode 1, 1993.
Also notable: "Jose Chung's From Outer Space", season 3 episode 20, 1996.
“Schisms”, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season 6 Episode 5, 1992.
Another bizarre alien episode of TV that comes to mind is “High Strangeness” from Adventure Time, which is a truly bizarre story about alien contact that is turned on its head when the characters discover that a planned space colonisation project is causing harm to the ship of Grey Aliens that have been visiting their world. It incorporates numerous extremely specific references to the mythos around alien contact and real world stories and figures in contactee/abductee communities, including its depiction of the iconic greys, the members of a contactee support group including a character who ‘channels’ an alien entity, its depiction of ‘star children’, the hybrid offspring of aliens and earthlings, its scenes of alien abduction, as well as its references to other pop culture aliens.
Hayao Miyazaki(director), The Boy and the Heron, 2023.
It didn’t end up fitting into this piece, but part of what brought me to include this film alongside Kafka on the Shore were the parallels that can be drawn between their mystical other worlds, the character’s experiences of missing time and disappearance, the connections between the main character and a younger, past version of the mother in the magical dream world, the other world as a source of inspiration, experience, and change as well as great danger, etc. I think this could all be analysed more seriously/in depth but just wanted to mention here something I’d been pondering
Bader, Christopher D. “Supernatural Support Groups: Who Are the UFO Abductees and Ritual-Abuse Survivors?” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 42, no. 4 (2003): 669–78. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1387914.
The group in reference here is a currently active religious community called the Aetherius Society. They have an active blog, podcast, and other media if you are curious. This is neither an endorsement nor a critique of the group or their beliefs.
Which is interesting because I always heard that men are from mars and women are from venus… feel free to build whatever conspiracy theories you would like out of this.
Lepselter, 71.
Did anyone else watch the 2010 episode “The Hungry Earth” at too impressionable an age… just me….?
we do not have TIME to get into Scientology right now, okay,
Ngannelong is an Aboriginal name for this geological formation.
Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Melbourne: F.W. Cheshire, 1967.
Also referenced is the film: Peter Weir(director), Picnic at Hanging Rock, 1975.
Lepselter, Susan Claudia. The resonance of unseen things : poetics, power, captivity, and UFOs in the American uncanny. Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2016. ISBN 9780472072941r.
The quote at the opening of this newsletter comes from page 80 of the text.
I first read selections from this book in college but have been revisiting it while thinking about this topic and definitely recommend. (If you are interested in reading but cannot access this text on your own, email me ;) — same goes for most references I use, btw.)
Lepselter, 32-33.
Lepselter, 76.
Lepselter, 19.
Unfortunately we had to do a unit on the concepts of ‘known knowns’ and ‘known unknowns’ my last year of high school for a class called “theory of knowledge” and the phrase has been stuck in my brain ever since! (sorry to the fellow TOKers who might be reading this)