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They Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves: The History and Politics of Alien Abduction
What's really behind Americans' persistent belief in alien abductions?
Since its emergence in the 1960s, belief in alien abduction has saturated popular culture, with the ubiquitous image of the almond-eyed alien appearing on everything from bumper stickers to bars of soap. Drawing on interviews with alleged abductees from the New York area, Bridget Brown suggests a new way for people to think about the alien phenomenon, one that is concerned not with establishing whether aliens actually exist, but with understanding what belief in aliens in America may tell us about our changing understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.
They Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves looks at how the belief in abduction by extraterrestrials is constituted by and through popular discourse and the images provided by print, film, and television. Brown contends that the abduction phenomenon is symptomatic of a period during which people have come to feel increasingly divested of the ability to know what is real or true about themselves and the world in which they live. The alien abduction phenomenon helps us think about how people who feel left out create their own stories and fashion truths that square with their own experience of the world.
Since its emergence in the 1960s, belief in alien abduction has saturated popular culture, with the ubiquitous image of the almond-eyed alien appearing on everything from bumper stickers to bars of soap. Drawing on interviews with alleged abductees from the New York area, Bridget Brown suggests a new way for people to think about the alien phenomenon, one that is concerned not with establishing whether aliens actually exist, but with understanding what belief in aliens in America may tell us about our changing understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.
They Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves looks at how the belief in abduction by extraterrestrials is constituted by and through popular discourse and the images provided by print, film, and television. Brown contends that the abduction phenomenon is symptomatic of a period during which people have come to feel increasingly divested of the ability to know what is real or true about themselves and the world in which they live. The alien abduction phenomenon helps us think about how people who feel left out create their own stories and fashion truths that square with their own experience of the world.
247 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 5, 2022
The release last year of videos taken by US military aircraft of objects whose maneuvers seemed to defy physics produced a surge of interest in UFOs. It seems like that fascination has faded, maybe partly because the government released a study of the videos that offered no explanation but derided the extraterrestrial interpretation, perhaps partly because more urgent issues--like the pandemic--pushed it aside.
Public concern about UFOs has risen and faded over the decades since 1947, when the first "flying saucers" were reported. (That sighting now seems to have been explained as a meteor breaking up.) There was a "flap" in the mid-1950s when a brace of UFOs sailed over Washington, DC, and again in the 1980s when the Roswell crash was revived by some publications.
Bridget Brown's They Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves explores a subset of the UFO phenomenon: alien abduction. The claim that aliens have been abducting us for experimentation, much sexual and gruesome, took off in 1987 with the appearance, just months apart, of Whitley Strieber's Communion: A True Story and Budd Hopkins's Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods; Hopkins had already published Missing Time in 1981. These books--Strieber's personal tale of his own repeated abductions and Hopkins's compilation of abductees' stories--built on the classic 1966 Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours Aboard a Flying Saucer by John Fuller, recounting the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill. A raft of abduction claims and studies appeared in the subsequent 15 or so years, but then, by 2007, when Brown's book came out, seem to have trailed off.
Brown, who most adamantly does not accept the abduction claim, set out both to chronicle the abductions and to try to come to some understanding of what forces may have been driving them. In contrast to some other studies--she is especially critical of, on the one hand, the credulous approach of researchers like John Mack and, on the other, dismissive skeptics like Elaine Showalter--Brown's approach was to read accounts closely, examine the personal histories of abductees (when possible), conduct in-depth interviews, and set the phenomenon of abduction in larger social and cultural contexts. The result is somewhat uneven but in many respects one of the best books on the subject I have read.
Except for a handful of individuals, Brown avoids the "nuts" diagnosis, and also assertions of confabulation or outright fraud. Instead, she notes the remarkable correlations between accounts of abductees and other, contemporary claims of abuse like the Satanic cult accusations leveled against child-care workers in the 1990s. Childhood sexual and other abuse, painful chronic medical conditions, social isolation--these factors, while not always present, crop up often enough for Brown to suggest that abduction narratives may serve as coping mechanisms for dealing with overwhelming personal suffering. She explores the role of psychohypnosis in steering patients away from mundane explanations of their experiences--which are often not consciously remembered but must be "recovered" with the help of "professionals" all too often themselves committed to uncovering abductions--toward terrifying "memories" of experimentation, egg and sperm extraction, and what amounts to torture by the Grays in their space ships. The broader context Brown sees as helping promote abduction is the anxiety provoked by massive changes in the US in the 1980s and 1990s and the proliferation of TV and book depictions of abduction, which helped spread and normalize the abduction narrative grounded in the Hills's experience.
Some abductees are also thoroughly committed to comprehensive conspiracy theories, which posit US government cooperation with alien abduction and the existence of underground bases, often abandoned US military sites, where the Grays undertake their work in safety in exchange for providing the military with advanced technology. The reason the Grays are so interested in us and willing to pass on techno-secrets to the state is that they are incapable of reproduction without the use of human germ cells--hence the harvesting, the endless explorations of our genitalia (really, wouldn't you think a look or two would suffice? why thousands and thousands of examinations?), and the production of sometimes monstrous human-alien hybrids incubated in the wombs of abductees who are later forced to hold and sometimes even nurse them.
The trajectories of the abduction and hybridization narratives are very interesting, though only marginally explored by Brown. The first alien-human hybrid effort reported occurred in 1957, when the Brazilian farmer Antonio Villas Boas was abducted and met a naked alien woman aboard a flying saucer. They undertook the experiment in the old-fashioned way, but except for a case or two, plain old human sex was soon replaced by the artificial extraction of material and in vitro fertilization. (Brown only passingly wonders whether this change might be associated with real-life in vitro fertilization.) Perhaps the most marked change happened as the benign aliens of contactees like George Adamski, who had our best interests at heart as they warned us against nuclear war and promised with time and change we could join the galactic community, became the menacing, malevolent Grays--who might salt their horrific experiments with warnings of environmental disaster, but, unlike Adamski's "space brothers and sisters," lacked any emotional connection with their guests or sympathy for the pain and terror they inflicted.
Brown thinks the decline in abduction stories by the early 2000s was due to the emergence of more pressing problems, like the post-9/11 world. Who needs aliens when you have real-life terrorists? Moreover, the push to accept the realities of childhood abuse may have reduced the need for cover stories in overwhelmed victims.
If there are weaknesses in Brown's book, they are of a nature hard to correct. She can show correlation with social and cultural pressures, but it is difficult, in a case of an individual, to construct a clear causal link between them and an abduction event. Her interviewee pool is also very small--just 11 people, all in the New York City region. While this focus has given her narratives a great deal of detail and nuance, it raises the question of how typical these self-selected abductees might be of the larger population.
But these matters aside, Brown's book offers a more detailed, careful, and thought-provoking study of a genuine American cultural phenomenon (not that there are not abductees outside the US, but the origins of the phenomenon and most of its participants are American) than others I have read. No doubt eventually there will be other, more comprehensive looks, as time passes and distance makes helps; They Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves will remain as a basic effort to elucidate something that the vast majority of us see as incomprehensible.
Public concern about UFOs has risen and faded over the decades since 1947, when the first "flying saucers" were reported. (That sighting now seems to have been explained as a meteor breaking up.) There was a "flap" in the mid-1950s when a brace of UFOs sailed over Washington, DC, and again in the 1980s when the Roswell crash was revived by some publications.
Bridget Brown's They Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves explores a subset of the UFO phenomenon: alien abduction. The claim that aliens have been abducting us for experimentation, much sexual and gruesome, took off in 1987 with the appearance, just months apart, of Whitley Strieber's Communion: A True Story and Budd Hopkins's Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods; Hopkins had already published Missing Time in 1981. These books--Strieber's personal tale of his own repeated abductions and Hopkins's compilation of abductees' stories--built on the classic 1966 Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours Aboard a Flying Saucer by John Fuller, recounting the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill. A raft of abduction claims and studies appeared in the subsequent 15 or so years, but then, by 2007, when Brown's book came out, seem to have trailed off.
Brown, who most adamantly does not accept the abduction claim, set out both to chronicle the abductions and to try to come to some understanding of what forces may have been driving them. In contrast to some other studies--she is especially critical of, on the one hand, the credulous approach of researchers like John Mack and, on the other, dismissive skeptics like Elaine Showalter--Brown's approach was to read accounts closely, examine the personal histories of abductees (when possible), conduct in-depth interviews, and set the phenomenon of abduction in larger social and cultural contexts. The result is somewhat uneven but in many respects one of the best books on the subject I have read.
Except for a handful of individuals, Brown avoids the "nuts" diagnosis, and also assertions of confabulation or outright fraud. Instead, she notes the remarkable correlations between accounts of abductees and other, contemporary claims of abuse like the Satanic cult accusations leveled against child-care workers in the 1990s. Childhood sexual and other abuse, painful chronic medical conditions, social isolation--these factors, while not always present, crop up often enough for Brown to suggest that abduction narratives may serve as coping mechanisms for dealing with overwhelming personal suffering. She explores the role of psychohypnosis in steering patients away from mundane explanations of their experiences--which are often not consciously remembered but must be "recovered" with the help of "professionals" all too often themselves committed to uncovering abductions--toward terrifying "memories" of experimentation, egg and sperm extraction, and what amounts to torture by the Grays in their space ships. The broader context Brown sees as helping promote abduction is the anxiety provoked by massive changes in the US in the 1980s and 1990s and the proliferation of TV and book depictions of abduction, which helped spread and normalize the abduction narrative grounded in the Hills's experience.
Some abductees are also thoroughly committed to comprehensive conspiracy theories, which posit US government cooperation with alien abduction and the existence of underground bases, often abandoned US military sites, where the Grays undertake their work in safety in exchange for providing the military with advanced technology. The reason the Grays are so interested in us and willing to pass on techno-secrets to the state is that they are incapable of reproduction without the use of human germ cells--hence the harvesting, the endless explorations of our genitalia (really, wouldn't you think a look or two would suffice? why thousands and thousands of examinations?), and the production of sometimes monstrous human-alien hybrids incubated in the wombs of abductees who are later forced to hold and sometimes even nurse them.
The trajectories of the abduction and hybridization narratives are very interesting, though only marginally explored by Brown. The first alien-human hybrid effort reported occurred in 1957, when the Brazilian farmer Antonio Villas Boas was abducted and met a naked alien woman aboard a flying saucer. They undertook the experiment in the old-fashioned way, but except for a case or two, plain old human sex was soon replaced by the artificial extraction of material and in vitro fertilization. (Brown only passingly wonders whether this change might be associated with real-life in vitro fertilization.) Perhaps the most marked change happened as the benign aliens of contactees like George Adamski, who had our best interests at heart as they warned us against nuclear war and promised with time and change we could join the galactic community, became the menacing, malevolent Grays--who might salt their horrific experiments with warnings of environmental disaster, but, unlike Adamski's "space brothers and sisters," lacked any emotional connection with their guests or sympathy for the pain and terror they inflicted.
Brown thinks the decline in abduction stories by the early 2000s was due to the emergence of more pressing problems, like the post-9/11 world. Who needs aliens when you have real-life terrorists? Moreover, the push to accept the realities of childhood abuse may have reduced the need for cover stories in overwhelmed victims.
If there are weaknesses in Brown's book, they are of a nature hard to correct. She can show correlation with social and cultural pressures, but it is difficult, in a case of an individual, to construct a clear causal link between them and an abduction event. Her interviewee pool is also very small--just 11 people, all in the New York City region. While this focus has given her narratives a great deal of detail and nuance, it raises the question of how typical these self-selected abductees might be of the larger population.
But these matters aside, Brown's book offers a more detailed, careful, and thought-provoking study of a genuine American cultural phenomenon (not that there are not abductees outside the US, but the origins of the phenomenon and most of its participants are American) than others I have read. No doubt eventually there will be other, more comprehensive looks, as time passes and distance makes helps; They Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves will remain as a basic effort to elucidate something that the vast majority of us see as incomprehensible.
January 18, 2021
I recently became interested in alien abductees, mass hysteria episodes within the United States, and the psychology and historical development of Conspiracy Theorists. I found this book to be an incredibly helpful look into the historical development of alien contact & abductee claims in the United States. In looking into the psychological profile of alien abductees as well as the meanings they place onto their experience, the book is a very good overview. On a broader historical note, the book also does a reasonably good job of discussing why the popularity of alien abduction claims ebbs and flows. I am curious is at some point in the future, the author will write a new edition of the book that discusses the bizarre popularity of the "Raid Area 51" event that occurred in 2018, and how aliens abductees/conspiracy theorists have possibly been reinvigorated at this point in American culture.
November 29, 2021
Just okay. Poses a lot of interesting ideas but doesn’t really explain or follow through on them. Personal accounts of alleged abductees provide a unique insight into abduction phenomenon but no real claims are made.
July 31, 2023
This research goes over and beyond to understand the psyche of abductees and conspiracists with great detail and examples.
May 28, 2023
Full review: http://lawrencedebbs.home.blog/2023/0...
Now this is some great academia. Brown takes a gently inquisitive American Studies approach to ask why alien abduction stories became such a phenomenon in the latter half of the twentieth century. She explores the need to express trauma, the hypnotism fad, the loss of trust in government, societal atomization and the rise of fragmented radio and tv. You get a whole portrait of the American psyche exploring the weirdness.
Now this is some great academia. Brown takes a gently inquisitive American Studies approach to ask why alien abduction stories became such a phenomenon in the latter half of the twentieth century. She explores the need to express trauma, the hypnotism fad, the loss of trust in government, societal atomization and the rise of fragmented radio and tv. You get a whole portrait of the American psyche exploring the weirdness.
July 31, 2011
She looks critically at the progression themes in alien abduction stories. Her thesis is that abduction narratives express a deep feeling of human impotence and powerlessness against the faceless, unopposable, inevitable influence of globalization on all our lives.
I enjoyed her use of classic abduction narratives, starting with Betty and Barney Hill, Betty Andreasson, Whitley Streiber, etc. She also looks deeply into the hypnotists and others behind the stories; examining the role of players like John Mack, Jacobs, and of course Budd Hopkins.
It was a wonderful analysis, told a unique and clever voice. Full of all the academic armamenta that scholars like me love -- bibliographic references and long explanatory footnotes.
I enjoyed her use of classic abduction narratives, starting with Betty and Barney Hill, Betty Andreasson, Whitley Streiber, etc. She also looks deeply into the hypnotists and others behind the stories; examining the role of players like John Mack, Jacobs, and of course Budd Hopkins.
It was a wonderful analysis, told a unique and clever voice. Full of all the academic armamenta that scholars like me love -- bibliographic references and long explanatory footnotes.
June 24, 2015
An anthropological investigation of the alien abduction phenomenon, which casts it as a response to various global, governmental, and social crises of the late twentieth century. Very academic and a little weighty, but with that comes the depth to which the author explores her thesis. Brown remains skeptical to the truth claims of abductees, focusing on interpretation and analysis instead of debunking. The chapters on the intersection of alien abduction and conspiracy theory are of particular note.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews