omg alienz!1!!: October 2009

Sorry everybody! I've been so focused on getting ready to present that I forgot I was supposed to give you a heads up on the subject matter. Here's hoping you have some time to digest this stuff before I jump right in tomorrow.

I decided to use my presentation to work on introducing Foucault, and the use to which I'll put his work in discussing Ufology, to an audience that may not have any knowledge of him. This has been taking a toll on me, as every other time I've written about him it's been for a class with a professor who's already versed in his ideas. Making the case for my project is very important to me, as I believe I've got a strong argument to present; it's just in explaining the justification I've worked out in my head for this task that I'm finding myself frustrated.

The text that follows is NOT an explanation of Foucault. It's an application of what I've already internalized about him to a particularly prominent psychology article on UFO abductions. This is meant as a step in the direction of characterizing the ways in which discourse has constructed what I'm temporarily calling the (abnormal) Ufological Subject, as it stands in contrast to the (normal) Properly-Scientific Subject.

**note: "UFOPh" is shorthand for the UFO phenomenon as a whole. "ETH" is shorthand for the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis, which states that at least some UFOs are interplanetary craft piloted by extraterrestrial beings.

Psychology: Explaining the Memory of Abduction
For this section, we will look at a 1996 article from Psychological Inquiry entitled, “Toward an Explanation of the UFO Abduction Phenomenon: Hypnotic Elaboration, Extraterrestrial Sadomasochism, and Spurious Memories.” The authors of the article—Leonard Newman of the University of Illinois at Chicago and Roy Baumeister of Case Western University—aim to place their explanation of the memory of abduction in line with the apparently then-fashionable topic of “the fallibility of autobiographical memory” (100). For Newman and Baumeister, memories of abductions are a kind of fantasy akin to that of sadomasochism, both of which arise from a desire to escape the stresses of self-construction in the modern world. Unlike masochistic fantasies, however, the fantasy of abduction is strongly believed to have actually occurred by the individual who experiences it; this, they claim, is attributable to the creation of “spurious” (literally—bastard spawn) memories during the process of hypnosis under which the memory of abduction is often first recovered or elaborated in detail, and with which the entire phenomenon of abduction memories is associated (99-100; 105).

Newman and Baumeister do state explicitly that, “the most straightforward account for UFO abductions would be that they actually occur” (103). They then detail some examples of what would have to be the case for this to be true—people being levitated through walls and abducted from urban areas without anyone else noticing, for instance—and follow these examples by observing that, “On strictly logical grounds...UFO abduction memories are difficult to accept. As with everyone else, though, our initial reaction to the stories people tell—including bizarre ones such as these—is to assume that they reflect some real experience and to believe them” (103). Amazingly, another page of consideration follows wherein it is considered what, if anything, would lend support to the ETH. The authors entertain several possibilities, including corroborating testimony and physical evidence—but only of abductions, never with respect to the brute existence of the ETH—and conclude once and for all that the lack of evidence to support the ETH, coupled with the parsimony of dropping it as a contending explanation, forces them to look elsewhere for a more “subtle” account of the existence of false memories of extraterrestrial abduction (104).

Newman and Baumeister's paper is one of the most frequently cited treatments of the abduction phenomenon in the field of psychology. This paper tells us quite a bit, then, about how the UFOPh can be seen to fall within the explanatory domain of a certain discipline and thereby to serve as the subject of scholarship. For one thing, it is clear from even the most cursory review of that portion of the published psychological literature which deals in any substantive way with the UFOPh that Newman and Baumeister's focus on abductions is highly representative of psychology as a whole. It is also clear that psychology's concern with the abduction phenomenon lies almost exclusively in attempting to discover the mechanism(s) whereby the belief in one's having been abducted—or the sometimes extremely vivid memory thereof—is established in the mind. Indeed, the strength of the belief and/or memory is perhaps its most puzzling quality, as the account of the experience is always told with such conviction that most researchers dismiss outright the possibility that these stories could be intentional fabrications on the part of the abductees. Newman and Baumeister are representative of their field in more ways as well, a few of which include: the prevalence given to the observation that abductees (or “contactees,” in other studies) are most often psychologically normal aside from their connections to UFOs; the attempt by researchers to establish a connection between the memory of abduction and some other, usually traumatic event in the abductee's life (especially those of a sexual or dissociative nature); and the attempt to discern a principled relationship between the mechanism responsible for creating the false memories and the discovery of particularly effective forms of treatment.

In order to approach the UFOPh, then, psychology first conceives of it as having some set of causes other than that to which its literal appearance would attest; i.e., psychology takes a negative position on the ETH. The UFOPh must then be whittled down in such a way as to enable the field to focus only on those aspects which are suitable for psychological analysis. This results in psychology being interested almost solely in the abduction phenomenon, which can be made to fit within the established conceptual boundaries of pre-existing research—such as that on the fallibility of autobiographical memory—and which appears to offer itself to investigation by many of the same methods already in use on those subjects. It is especially interesting that at this point, at least with Newman and Baumeister, we actually see the practitioners of the discipline entertaining the possibility of the ETH as a viable explanation for the phenomenon. Their consideration of the ETH is far from genuine, of course, and serves the dual purpose of signaling to others in the field that the ETH shall not be taken seriously in this arena while simultaneously establishing the case for psychology as an appropriate sphere within which to locate the phenomenon of true academic interest, since it is supposed by the authors that “the spaceships emerge from our minds” (104).

A last note of interest concerning the authors' thoughts on the plausibility of the ETH: although their attention is focused strictly on the mental phenomenon of abduction memories, Newman and Baumeister do give the impression in these passages that it is the whole ETH whose possibility they are considering, of which the abduction phenomenon accounts for perhaps the most visible aspect, but which is by no means a central feature of the ETH as such. Their dismissal of the ETH is then premised on their inability to find supporting evidence for it, yet they only seek evidence of the the ETH in the context of abductions. They therefore fail to find anything constituting significant support for the ETH, such as third party witnesses or physical traces/effects. The fact that such evidence does exist, and in force, outside of the context of abductions demonstrates several things. First, Newman and Baumeister must not have looked very hard into the UFOPh for evidence in support of the ETH when attempting to eliminate their explanatory options, or else they would have found plenty to puzzle them. Second, whether by choice or by training, they appear to equate the entirety of the UFOPh with the phenomenon of abduction. This is a common association in the popular mind which probably owes itself to the fact that the abduction theme only exploded onto the cultural scene in the relatively recent history of UFOs (at which time it was immediately seized upon and quickly became disproportionately representative of the UFOPh in film and television). But for Newman and Baumeister to reduce the possibility of the ETH to the realm of physical evidence of abductions—and to then launch a psychological account of abductions based on the failure of the ETH—is for them to be subject to at least one of several charges. Either they are being grossly dishonest in the path they construct to establish the inevitability of psychology's annexation of the abduction phenomenon (which is true), or they are woefully yet innocently unaware of their subject matter (which is also true), or they embarrass themselves by being so foolish as to think that the “abduction reduction” is either logically or scientifically justifiable based on their reasoning (which is especially true).

It is with respect to these last few points that Newman and Baumeister are most helpful in demonstrating the disciplinary appropriation of the UFOPh at work. In order to count as an object of psychological interest, the UFOPh must be made to exist as a psychological phenomenon. As we know, this is only possible by taking a negative position on the ETH, because even leaving the matter up for debate would prevent psychology from being able to unquestionably assert its explanatory role in relation to the particular aspect of the UFOPh to which it addresses itself. But the explanatory role of the discipline is not strictly scholarly, nor is its function merely that of analysis or description.

By allowing itself to be described in psychological language, the UFOPh becomes an accessory to its own intellectual colonization. Strictly speaking, it is less in the interests of the UFOPh to be granted entry into the world of academically-knowable subjects via the discipline of psychology than it is for the UFOPh to remain completely academically illegitimate. While there is a certain admission of the reality of a thing in consenting to the fact that it can be studied on an academic or scholarly level, the mode of reality bestowed is determined first by the ways in which it is most fundamentally possible for the thing to be studied, but more importantly by the ways in which it is interesting to those who wish to study it. In the context of academia, novels are interesting as fictional stories before they are interesting as history; historical documents are interesting as records of past events before they are interesting as literary works. To the Ufological Subject, it may be most interesting of all to study the UFOPh in the context of an interdisciplinary “Center for UFO Studies” housed at a major research institution; to academia, and therefore to the Properly-Scientific Subject, however, it is most interesting to study the UFOPh in the contexts of false memories, cultural psyches, social deviance, and irrationalism.