All the Lonely People

I remember learning about the Betty and Barney Hill abduction when I was a kid, probably through In Search Of or some such show. For years I wondered about supposed alien abductees; their stories were usually highly detailed and often sounded sincere, yet they fell well short of bar set when Carl Sagan correctly said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.¹" Still, could all of those people be crazy?

Now I'm more convinced that the answer is yes, and the reason is the most common affliction of the psyche. A few days ago I learned that years before the birth of the Abductee Movement came the Contactee Movement. Thousands of people claimed that benevolent aliens visited them and took them aboard their well-appointed flying saucers. These aliens, who were not only described as Caucasian but generally attractive, hailed from utopian worlds, and displayed concern for humanity's flirtation with atomic weapons.

The Contactees' stories tended to be highly detailed, sometimes including flying saucer floor plans listing the numbers of state rooms and bathrooms and the attire of the alien hosts, but what's telling are the larger details: utopian planets populated by human beings, worry about the Cold War and nuclear cataclysm.

But most illuminating of all, each individual's account that I've researched included self-aggrandizing language. "They showed me the secrets of the Universe." "I've been in telepathic contact with them for months." "They took me up in their ship over 350 times." The Contactee stories reflect a magnified version of the teller, like the funhouse mirror that makes you look taller. The contactee is so important that s/he is chosen out of billions of Earthlings to be visited, and here's where both the Contactee and Abductee Movements meet. Whether you're invited to see the happy colonies of Jupiter or invaded by an anal probe you're still chosen, still singled out, special. What drives these people is loneliness, and the need to be liked and to belong. Whether you get attention from being afforded privileges or subjugated you're getting attention, and whether you belong to the Light Year High Club or the Alien S&M Club you still belong.