In 1992, Sheila (a pseudonym) sought the help of a prominent psychiatrist. Since the death of her mother in 1984, she had regularly found herself angry, sad and irritable. She was also experiencing terrifying nightmares: she would be unable to move, her body felt like it was vibrating, and she had dreams that someone or something was controlling her body. In one dream in particular, Sheila’s house filled with a high-pitched noise and flashing lights. Then, she saw several short, thin-limbed beings covered in silver walking down the hallway toward her bedroom.

At first, Sheila asked her pastor for a psychotherapy referral. Unhappy with the therapist, she went to see a psychiatrist. By the end of 1989, Sheila was still dreaming about the prowlers, whom she now perceived as aggressive and hostile. Over the next two years, she had more than 20 appointments with two more doctors, who treated her using hypnosis. She was given anti-anxiety and antidepressant medications. Under hypnosis, more details emerged about her dream experiences. She recalled seeing a skeleton-like face, a ‘curling iron’ with a handle and a drill-like tip, and she recalled being stretched out and tied down with rubber tubing. As time went on, Sheila began to consider the possibility that her recollections were not of dreams but of real events.

At some point in her treatment, the subject of UFOs came up. After a CBS television miniseries called Intruders (1992) that portrayed cases of alleged abduction of human beings by aliens had aired, a friend convinced Sheila she needed to explore that possibility more intensively and suggested she contact John Mack. A Pulitzer Prize-winning psychiatrist and professor at Harvard Medical School, Mack had recently begun working with individuals who believed they might have been taken and experimented on by extraterrestrials. Mack used hypnotic regression – a technique designed to recover lost memories – to help Sheila find out more about her past. The method seemed to work, and it confirmed what had been suspected: she was having alien encounters. Moreover, she discovered that she had been having visitations in her home since before the age of six, and that both Sheila’s sister and daughter had also been having strange encounters. It all left her feeling violated, terrified that she was unable to protect her family, and overcome with dread that ‘they’ would return.

Sheila was not alone in her disturbing experiences and her search for answers. By the early 1990s, numerous individuals had been coming forward in alarming numbers to say they feared they had been taken against their will by aliens. One survey published in 1992 found that perhaps as many as one out of every 50 adults in the United States had had such encounters. Later that year, MIT held an academic conference to discuss the phenomenon. Books on the subject made the bestseller list, cases were made into screenplays, and self-professed abductees made appearances on television talk shows.

Alien abduction sparked not only interest but controversy – and on multiple fronts. The claims of witnesses tested the limits of how far society should respect the testimony and beliefs of others. Questions were raised about just how reliable personal memories were. And academics debated which experts and which methods were best suited to determine the truth.

Why did the phenomenon of alien abduction suddenly disappear from the list of popular concerns?

Sheila’s ordeal followed three decades of reports and public fascination in the US with people being ‘kidnapped by UFOs’, as one PBS show put it. Since the first sightings of ‘flying saucers’ in 1947, individuals had come forward to say they had had encounters with the occupants of unidentified flying objects. Throughout the 1950s and the early ’60s, most reported that their experiences had been pleasant, even spiritually fulfilling. But over the course of the 1960s and ’70s, an increasing number of cases emerged in which witnesses claimed to have been forcibly taken by the visitors. And then, at the start of the 21st century, interest in the phenomenon suddenly all but disappeared. To be sure, individuals have continued to claim having these fraught experiences since then. But mainstream US media and the reading public moved on from alien abductions. Even now, after revelations reported in The New York Times in 2017 about a secret government UFO programme inspired a revival of interest in unidentified flying objects, alien abduction has yet to claim a place alongside widely publicised sightings by military pilots, videos of odd-moving aircraft, the supposed mummified remains of extraterrestrials and drone scares.

At their height in the 1990s, stories of alien abduction proved so compelling that they inspired a major US television show. The X-Files, which first appeared in 1993, offered viewers an engaging fictional account of how extraterrestrials, conspiring with government officials, were insidiously victimising humans. By 2002, however, the series that had been ‘must-watch’ TV ended its original run (two revival seasons were filmed in 2016 and 2018), just as alien abduction began losing its public visibility. Why did this extraordinary phenomenon that challenges commonsense certainties about the real world suddenly disappear from the list of popular concerns? The answer lies in who ultimately got to decide what was and what wasn’t true about alien abduction, and how they managed to not so much solve its riddle as reconcile themselves with the phenomenon.

Debate over the authenticity of paranormal phenomena is hardly new. Historically, authorities of various kinds have been called upon to decide........

© Aeon