Jerome Clark’s “UFO Encyclopedia” – Thomas Bullard’s “Abduction Phenomenon”

Where have all the abductees gone?

Back in the 90s, which feels in retrospect like UFOlogy’s golden decade, they seemed to be everywhere.  Comic strips spoofed them, a sure sign of their high visibility–readers could be counted on to get the joke.  With the new century, perhaps helped along by 9/11, they faded away.  Had the aliens gotten what they wanted from their victims, and decided to give us poor earthlings a rest?

I posed this question on my blog about six years ago, and got an interesting response from a reader calling himself “Terry the Censor.”  Terry suggested that the apparent decline was due to the Internet’s having made it possible for the abductees to contact each other directly, bypassing the “experts” like Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs.

These “experts” had imposed a fear-based model on the abduction experience–the aliens cold and indifferent at best, sinister at worst, plotting to take over this planet and make it their own.  Liberated from their influence, the abductees could see their experiences as “transformative and mostly positive learning experiences … even spiritual, suggesting the aliens are offering salvation.

“Simply put, the abductees are not disappearing, they’re turning back into contactees.  The contact experience has come full circle.”

It’s an intriguing thought, and we now have a framework in which to consider it.  The third edition of Jerome Clark’s marvelous The UFO Encyclopedia, about which I blogged last July, has just come out; and like the second edition of 1998, it leads off (for obvious alphabetic reasons) with Thomas E. Bullard’s article “Abduction Phenomenon.”

This is one of the few articles in the encyclopedia not written by Jerry himself, and Jerry couldn’t have made a finer choice for its author.  A trained folklorist, Bullard made his mark on the study of abductions with his landmark 1987 monograph UFO Abductions: The Measure of a Mystery, when the phenomenon was still in its early stages.  (Whitley Strieber’s Communion, which did so much to shape public perceptions of abductions and the beings who were carrying them out, was published that same year.)  He’s kept up with the burgeoning literature ever since.

Naturally, Bullard’s current essay draws heavily on its 1998 predecessor.  He hasn’t simply retouched it, though, adding paragraphs here and there to bring it up to date.  It’s a fresh, new piece of work, covering the 60-year sweep of the phenomenon, how it’s stayed the same and how it’s mutated since its beginnings.  I call it an “article,” but at 37 large double-columned pages in type that’s a bit too small for my eyes’ comfort, it could easily pass as a short monograph.  And like the encyclopedia of which it’s part, it’s a masterpiece of engaged yet dispassionate scholarship.

It’s divided into four major sections.  First Bullard gives a historical narrative, “A History of the Abduction Phenomenon,” which extends through the past two decades and explains that, no, people haven’t stopped reporting abductions but yes, they have fallen “from the eminence they enjoyed in the past century” (and some proposals as to why).  Then a phenomenology of “Abductees and the Experiences They Report.”

Then come two sections setting out and evaluating the principal modes of interpretation–“What Are Abductions?–The Literalist View” (which includes the straightforward theory that ETs are the culprits, as well as the more recondite approaches that seem to shuttle between psychology and parapsychology), and “What Are Abductions?–The Reductionist View.”  The last few columns are a conclusion, or the closest thing to a conclusion that Bullard is prepared to offer.

For he admits: when all is said and done, we still don’t know what’s going on.  The ET explanation is just too hard to swallow.  “Can anyone believe aliens are not only here but hard at work scouring the neighborhood for victims and processing human captives by the millions?  Such a program would fill the sky with UFOs coming and going, thick as motes of dust in a sunbeam, but instead we see blue sky or stars.”  Yet we have “hundreds, even thousands of reports” by people who to all appearances are entirely credible, absolutely sincere, not in it for the bucks (which are sparse) or the fame (which is fleeting and much leavened with ridicule).  Their psychological profiles, moreover, turn out to be no different from the vast majority of human beings who don’t seem to get abducted.

“In the end we have the experience but not the event,” Bullard says, perhaps echoing Jerry Clark’s distinction between “event anomalies” where something weird is really happening in the physical world, vs. “experience anomalies” where the experience is real but doesn’t seem to have any correlate outside the experiencer.  (Jerry staunchly refuses to reduce these “experience anomalies” to any categories outside themselves, such as the psychological, and that’s where he and I differ; I’m a reductionist at heart.)  “As an experience,” says Bullard, “UFO abduction is very real.  As a reality the questions mount but some cases continue to trouble human curiosity like an itch we cannot reach to scratch.”

Yet we keep stretching for that itch.  Or at least some of us do.

It’s fascinating to compare the conclusions of Bullard’s two articles, the 1998 and the 2018 versions.  In each, he invokes a prominent scientist: Carl Sagan (1998) or Kary Mullis (2018).  The “second edition” article takes its text from Sagan’s book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.  Sagan makes a strong case against the reality of the abductions.  Yet he also quotes a letter from a 47-year-old woman who (in Bullard’s words) “has experienced abductions since childhood but does not believe aliens are responsible and would welcome a solution even if it turned out to be psychopathology.”  It’s a lucid letter, and rational.  The woman “asks for a hearing for the phenomenon itself, rather than for a solution to its nature.”

Her plea fails to evoke in Sagan the slightest curiosity.  No scratching of this particular itch for him; he doesn’t even feel it.  “Throughout all of Sagan’s fine plea for reason and science,” Bullard comments, “something vital is missing, and that is the very curiosity on which science depends.”

Contrast the Nobel prize-winning biochemist Kary Mullis, with whose abduction-related story (from Mullis’s memoir Dancing Naked in the Mind Field) Bullard chooses to end his current essay.  I’ve already blogged on this story, with its comically bizarre glowing, talking raccoon; I won’t repeat it here.  But I will quote the paragraph that serves as Mullis’s conclusion, and Bullard’s as well:

“I wouldn’t try to publish a scientific paper about these things. … I can’t make glowing raccoons appear.  I can’t buy them from a scientific supply house for study.  I can’t cause myself to be lost again for several hours.  But I don’t deny what happened.  It’s what science calls anecdotal, because it only happened in a way that you can’t reproduce.  But it happened.”

Which of the two, do you suppose, is the truer scientist?

by David Halperin
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