Alien Abduction: Even if true, impossible to believe?

Michael E. Zimmerman

                  Widespread reports of alien abduction are particularly difficult to accept or even entertain, even by some people interested in the paranormal. (By “alien,” I mean non-human-intelligence [NHI] that manifests as entities allegedly abducting human beings. NIH may not come from other planets.) Physical scientists now studying the nuts-and-bolts aspects of UAP often ignore the abduction phenomenon lest it undermine the credibility or their fledgling research efforts. Abductees typically report that their experience was so shocking that they didn’t want to believe it either. Left hollow eyed, abduction experiencers struggle to reinflate or reinvent their worldview, while family and friends frequently don’t want to hear about what happened.

                  Most abductees report that they were forced to take part in an apparent human-alien hybridization program, the purpose of which is never adequately explained.  Perhaps Charles Fort was right when, after years spent researching impossible, he concluded: “The Earth is a farm. We are someone else’s property.” On the other hand, according to the FREE survey three fourth of abductees  (or experiencers) report that despite terror and anger, they eventually undergo an expansion of consciousness which reveals humanity’s threat to the biosphere.[1]

                  No one really know who the abductors are, where they come from, or what their intentions are. Hence, projection tends to occur when people interpret the intention of the abductors. Depending on the interpreter, these entities are seen as akin to demons  tormenting and tempting us; as beneficent beings attempting to save us (and the planet) from nuclear war and environmental destruction; as aliens from other solar systems who are studying humankind and at times intervening in human affairs for reasons of their own; as entities seeking to create a hybrid race to improve their own stock as well as that of humankind; or as co-generated phenomena arising from the interplay of productive imagination with intentional energies such as Jung’s archetypes of the unconscious. This last option is unappealing to many abductees who resist the suggestion that abductions occur in a third realm--“imaginal” or “astral” or “psychoid”—between the physical and the psychological. There are, however, reasons to keep some version of this option open, as Joshua Cutchin has been doing in several books, most recently Fourth Wall Phantoms: Reflections on the Paranormal, Narratives, and Fiction Becoming Fact.

                  In Out of Time: The Intergenerational Abduction Program Explained, abductee Steve Aspin understands why people find the phenomenon so difficult to accept. [1] A lifelong victim of alien abduction, Aspin was a successful designer and purveyor of medical equipment before retiring.  He was born and raised in England, a reminder that the abduction phenomenon is not restricted to the USA. Aliens reportedly abducted his great grandmother during the late 19th century, then his grandmother and finally his own mother. If he is right, tens of millions of people from around the world have been abducted on multiple occasions as part of an inter-generational alien-human hybridization program. If Aspin is right, only a very small percentage of people recall that they have been abducted. During his decades of research, Aspin befriended Budd  Hopkins and David Jacobs, well known researchers who maintained that humans are being abducted by real aliens for dark purposes unfriendly to humankind. Jacobs has praised” the depth and breadth of insights captured in Steven Aspin’s remarkable book.”

                  In addition to describing his own abduction experience, significant aspects of which are shared by most abductees (OT, 181-183).  Aspin writes that aliens can bury  abduction experience deep in a person’s memory , access to which is limited. Certain triggers may allow spontaneous recall of an abduction experience, he notes, as can carefully conducted hypnosis. The powerful alien gaze/mind scan happens in virtually every abduction. Aliens seemingly use the optic nerve to enter into the mind/brain, over which they have the mastery needed to generate effects such as false memories and screen images. Aspin also asserts that aliens travel down the brain stem into the autonomous nervous system, then into parasympathetic nervous system, thereby granting control over all organs. In effect, so he argues, aliens can create virtual experiences that cannot be distinguished from the real thing  and can also show to captives striking images of an human-damaged biosphere. Such images confer upon many abductees a sense of mission to prevent environmental destruction. (OT, 165-172)

                  Based on interviews with many other experiencers as well as his own recollections, Aspin offers a detailed account of the highly invasive procedures involved in the putative alien/human hybridization program. He does not explain why super-advanced aliens must resort to painful interventions to carry out this program. Human eggs are fertilized by semen forcibly extracted from male abductees, many of whom report that they undergo this  process every time they are abducted. Presumably via bioengineering, alien DNA is added to the fertilized egg. Female abductees often say that early pregnancies mysteriously end at around ten weeks, when their fetuses are “harvested.” Individual DNA may also be altered, such that even “normal” children will end up as hybrids. During their abductions, many experiencers report seeing hundreds of human fetuses either being stored or else completing their development in clear containers filled with fluid presumably containing nutrients. Small grey captors sometimes present these hybrids to captive women, many of whom report being both repulsed by the looks of the listless, strange looking hybrids, and yet also drawn to them emotionally as if the hybrids were their own offspring. (It is not known whether the entity presented is in fact a hybrid or instead a simulacra designed to elicit from the putative mother an emotional response desirable to the aliens.)

                  Unlike an increasing number of UAP researchers, Aspin maintains that aliens are extraterrestrials (ETs) from other solar systems. He  does not plausibly explain, however,  why DNA from vastly distant solar systems could possibly allow for hybridization with human DNA. Small alien greys do exhibit a humanoid morphology, despite some significant differences, such as very large eyes, four fingers, a slit-like mouth that never opens, no voice box, no alimentary canal, and so. Aspin suggests that the small greys may be bioengineered drones wholly devoted to their tasks, except when being “recharged” periodically. Taller greys display greater autonomy, although they too may be overseen by very tall mantis-like (insectoid) beings with terrestrial morphology. Abductees have also reported encountering very large, imposing reptilian entities, not to mention tall, blonde Nordic types.[2] The greys, however, are charged with carrying out most of the tasks associated with abducting humans.

                  Aspin examines physical evidence for abductions, such as scoop marks on the skin and tiny radio-wave emitting objects removed by physicians such as the late Dr. Roger Leir.[3] The appendix to Aspin’s book includes many photos, graphs, and medical reports. None of these constitutes an evidentiary smoking gun, but they suggest that the abduction phenomenon cannot readily be explained away as a psychological aberration. The Trickster aspect of UAP and associated abductions seemingly ensures that traditional evidence is always incomplete.

                  Beginning with Passport to Magonia (1969) Jacques Vallée began contesting both the ET and the strictly physicalist interpretation of aliens. Surprisingly, he described noteworthy parallels between yesterday’s faery abductions and today’s alien abductions. Conceding that such parallels  can be drawn, Aspin notes that his own grandmother referred to the “pixies” (faeries) that intervened in her life. He maintains, however, that drawing such parallels

"serves to confuse the issue somewhat and gave my grandmother something culturally recognizable to which she could attach her abduction experiences. Of course, the abductions could have been going on prior to 1890 but few reports survive which might reflect the standard abduction narrative, either as oral or written testimony." (189)

                  In several intensively researched books, however, Joshua Cutchin reveals many striking faery abduction/alien abduction parallels. He maintains that reports of aliens and faeries “are byproducts of their respective societies both grasping at an inherently universal, if unknowable, experience. Aliens and faeries may be identical, or only closely related, but the connections exist.” [4] He belabors the similarities because they confirm his conviction that both faeries and UFOs/aliens “are strongly tied to the dead….”  (27) Conceived as psychopomps, aliens help to prepare mortals for transition to the Otherworld. An abductee’s astral or “fourth plane” body (not the “third plane” physical) body is levitated through a window or wall, then into a waiting “craft” the astral body undergoes hybridization procedures. Sleep evidently provides helpful access to this plane.

                  In Passport to the Cosmos, the title being a nod to Vallée, John E. Mack also further explores the “imaginal” rather than the literally physical approach to abductions. Far from reducing abductions to merely subjective, psychological, or pathological factors, however, Mack maintained that the imaginal interpretation includes five factors preventing alien abductions from being dismissed as something merely psychological, that is, “only in the head” of an abductee.

First, the consistency of abduction reports.

                 Second, physicals signs like scars and witness-backed report of actual absence for a time.

                  Third, accounts from children too young for delusional psychiatric syndromes.

                 Fourth, an association with witness UAP.

                  Fifth, the lack of any consistent psychopathology among abductees.[5]

In 1997, after working with Mack on the abduction phenomenon for five years, I published the first of two peer-reviewed articles drawing on Mack’s book Abduction as well as on Patrick Harpur’s book, Daimonic Reality, which  Mack had recommended to me. Harpur argues that modern science has rejected the supernatural, otherworldly entities as haunting the pre-modern world. Modernity’s eliminative materialism  does not even allow a place for human consciousness. Nevertheless, as polls have consistently demonstrated, high percentages of Americans continue to report multiple forms of paranormal experiences as well as encounters with anomalous non-human entities. Alien abduction is perhaps only the most forceful instance of this “return of the repressed.” If  Jason A. Josephson-Storm is right in his brilliant book, The Myth of Disenchantment, however, many leading nineteenth and twentieth century scientists and scholars retained a strong interest in spiritualism and other anomalous domains. [6]  

  Studying the ontological status of aliens, not to mention other paranormal phenomena from poltergeists to Bigfoot, is a challenge that far too few philosophers have taken up.[7]  Here is what I concluded about the abduction phenomenon in 1997:

"I remain skeptical that these abductions can be understood literally as physical events, but I am also not persuaded by attempts to explain the phenomenon in terms of currently accepted psychopathological states. Instead, I regard the phenomenon as a challenge to received views of the nature of “experience” and “consciousness,” as well as to assumptions about humanity’s place in the cosmos".[8]

                   Many abductees, including some with whom I have spoken, insist that they have experienced aliens as real, solid, and existing in our space/time. In his presentation at 2025 Archives of the Impossible conference, anthropologist Peter Skafish too emphasized the bodily aspect of the alien others. In contrast, however, some people suggest that aliens are from another dimension but materialize as flesh-and-blood bodies, while others maintain that abduction experiences---no matter how vivid---are mind-generated. Writing in Them, Strieber equivocates:  

"When it [alien abduction] happens, there is no sense of dream or hallucination [my emphasis], but I would not conclude that, therefore, the presences are not being generated by the mind of the witness. In fact, I wouldn’t conclude anything because there is nothing to conclude. What can be done is to describe experience and try to interpret it as best we can." In The Fourth Mind, published a few years later, however, Strieber shifts from this phenomenological attitude to a form of physicalism: “They [the Grays] are real flesh and blood.” [9] 

                  Let us consider some implications of the view that literally physical aliens are literally abducting human beings. Aspin once asked a captor if as many as one in twenty (5%) of the human population had been abducted. He was told “something like that.” To evaluate the plausibility of this percentage, Aspin recalls the (in)famous Roper Poll undertaken during three months in 1991. Funded by Robert Bigelow, the poll was designed by Budd Hopkins, David Jacobs, and sociologist Ron Westrum.  Pollsters  interviewed 5,947 Americans. (Aspin says that the interviews were conducted  in people’s homes, but I cannot confirm this.) Early in the process, interviewees were asked five questions suggestive of abduction:

Have you ever:

 1.awakened paralyzed, sensing a strange figure or presence in the room?

 2. experienced an hour or more of ‘missing time’?

 3. felt like you were actually flying through the air without knowing why or how?

 4. seen unusual lights or balls of light in a room, without understanding what cause them?

 5. discovered puzzling scars on your body, without knowing how or why they got there. (OT 92)

                  Pollsters maintained that answering four out of the five questions affirmatively would indicate that interviewees had probably been abducted. (Whether this conclusion is methodologically sound remains open to question. ) 119 people answered “yes” to four questions. That number constitutes 2% of those interviewed, which is not far from 5%.  2% of the American population in 1991 amounted to about four million people. In 2022, three decades later, 2% of the global human population (about eight billion) would amount to 159 million people. The aforementioned figure grows by an order of magnitude if experiencers are abducted multiple times, as is usually reported. If individuals are abducted on (say) ten separate occasions during their lifetimes, there would have to be at least 1.59 billion separate physical abductions for 2% of today’s global population. If the total percentage of human abductees could be as high as 5%, as Aspin surmises, this would yield 400 million abductees and 4 billion separate abduction encounters. (OT 191-193) Aspin notes that this “gigantic operation” has been conducted with near-total secrecy by entities exerting extraordinary command over human perception, psychology, physiology, and so on. (OT 229) These enormous figures might give pause to those who interpret abductions as a literal technological enterprise.

                  Whereas some abduction researchers posit that far fewer people have been abducted than Aspin believes to be the case, Strieber asks: “are we dealing not with rare experiences at all but rather with a common one that is rarely remembered?” [10] Many people (including the present author) reported a shock of recognition upon seeing the alien face depicted on the  cover of Strieber’s Communion.  (The cover of The Fourth Mind  replaces the grey’s massive black eyes with more humanoid eyes with irises and pupils.) If abductions are “common,” meaning far more than 5% of the population, then the requisite number of physical (as opposed to astral or imaginal) abduction encounters run into the tens of billions.

                  Joseph Burkes, MD, who for decades led groups seeking UAP contact, suggests that these numbers could be greatly reduced if only some abductions were literally physical, while many other abductions occurred in a virtual reality setting rather than an astral-plane setting. Given the  apparent capacity of aliens for mind-reading, telepathy, and shapeshifting, they would presumably be capable of generating compelling virtual reality, early versions of which human high-tech companies are designing at this very moment.

                  Even if most of reported abductions are virtual rather than literally physical, the fact that millions of people at least experienced a typically traumatic abduction has never been regarded by establishment authorities (whether medical, political, or military) as a credible issue. Yet, Strieber received 300,000+ letter from people reporting abduction in years before email was widely available. Decades ago, a person had to be motivated to compose a personally revealing letter to a total stranger, a letter that had to be hand-written or typed, then placed into a stamped and addressed envelope that had to be put in the mail. I read many hundreds of such letters during oneof my visits to Mack’s PEER (Program for Extraordinary Experience Research) office in Cambridge. In addition to having similar content, the letters were above all emotionally moving. Individuals attempted to describe in their own idiosyncratic ways something almost indescribable, an entirely unexpected event that had shaken their lives and interfered with their personal relationships. Most authors had no wish to reveal themselves as  “abductees,” so they coped as well as possible on their own in the aftermath of their experience(s).

                  According to Aspin, the apparently massive twentieth century abduction wave has slowed down or even stopped, a fact that means we are “out of time.”  That is, the consequences of the massive hybridization program will soon become apparent. At the close of his book, he asks what it means that only about 5% of people have been abducted. When in 2016 he posed this question to one of the “hubrids” (human/alien hybrids), he was told that the aliens will at some point release a virus into the atmosphere, to which abductees and non-abductees will respond differently.[11]  Afterwards  everything would be “wonderful.” This reply recalls Biblical end-times discourse when humankind will be divided into sheep and goats, with only the former entering the promised land.

                  Aspin does not refer to any consciousness expansion resulting from abductions, nor does he discern much positive about them.  Budd Hopkins admits that "most abductees that I’ve worked with have an immediately more open, broader attitude toward any kind of metaphysical, spiritual kind of question or possibility…. In a strange way, they have seen a larger universe, closer-up, more than the rest of us have, whether they remember it clearly or not. As one person said, it’s as if, especially when they start exploring their experiences, they’ve gotten rid of the tunnel vision that most people have suffered from.” (OT 198)  

                  Hopkins’ remarks above agree with the FREE study’s finding that about 75% of abductees report an expansion of consciousness. However, he adds that: “…I’ve never met anyone who I think was helped by this. The psychological scars are there for everybody…. The self-doubt, even a kind of odd shame about their experiences, precludes a kind of easy, relaxed interaction with other people.”[12] Likewise, Strieber writes that the visitors often dominate us, treat us like animals to be captured and tagged, and want something from us that is very important to them, as well as to us. Perhaps they seek our DNA to revitalize their own, or our souls to animate new corporeal forms, or our intense emotional experiences. In The Fourth Mind (2024) Strieber writes: “If so, this would explain their interest in us, and also their response to my complaint that they had no right to do what they were doing to me.”[13] What was that response, as first reported in Communion? “We do have a right.” Chilling words to anyone accustomed to thinking that assigning and denying rights are exclusively human prerogatives.

                  In contrast, the more hopeful Mack likens alien abduction to an initiation program, in which trauma (however unwelcome initially) may lead to higher, non-dual modes of consciousness of the sort needed to save humankind and the planet from anthropogenic destruction. In addition to consciousness change, Mack says that the aliens are also apparently devising a new “evolutionary form” by way of the hybridization project. (Mack, Abduction, chapter 16)  These views are largely consistent with the FREE survey

                  Although Mack learned from the abduction findings provided by Hopkins and Jacobs, he was always cautious when it came to assessing the ontological status of abductions. Perhaps they are literally corporeal, but they may also materialize from another dimension or even have some other explanation. In Passport to the Cosmos, he explores in greater depth the possibility that the abduction phenomenon belongs

"to that particular class of phenomena, not even accepted by existing by mainstream Western science, that seem not to be of this visible, known material universe and yet appear to be manifest in it. These [paranormal] phenomena …seem to “cross over,” or to violate the radical separation of the spirit or unseen realms from the material world that is at the center of the scientific materialistic worldview." [14] 

                  Abductees have experiences that seem real-life and that are also deeply meaningful, as is often the case with UAP encounters. Mack coins the term “reified metaphor” to refer to the paradoxical imaginal character of the abduction phenomenon: “On the one hand, the experience is vividly and undeniably real and concrete for [the experiencer], while at the same time it is deeply metaphoric or archetypal, including representations of death, birth, rebirth, transcendence and enlightenment.”[15] 

                  In his many books about his encounters with the aliens, however, Strieber struggles to reconcile the dark side of the abduction process with its potentially transformational outcome. In Them, for example, he remarks:

"I’ve had enough personal contact with the visitors to know that they are an extremely complex entity, and appear to be deeply divided about us. In part, they are hostile toward us in ways so intricately horrible and bizarre that they could understandably be believed by intellectually unprepared observers to have a supernatural and thus demonic origin. [….]  [T]hey are probably not supernatural at all but living creatures. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have the ability to seem demonic [in the Biblical sense]." (My emphasis.)

                  In The Fourth Mind, however, he expresses hope that “open contact” will allow for a “communion” that will be "fruitful and meaningful to both sides, and advances mankind toward a goal of becoming a cosmic species, which I define as one that understands reality well enough to traverse space and time in the same way that our visitors do, whatever that is. We must be careful, though …. Theirs is a rescue mission, but they are not trying just to rescue us, but also themselves. Wary of revealing what they want from us, they creep into our lives by night and steal it." [16] 

                  If Aspin, Strieber, and others are right that abductions have largely ended, when might the “rescue mission” begin? Will it involve massive changes in human attitudes/practices needed to preserve the biosphere from human abuse?  What role will abductees play in this process? To what extent do they retain the worldview-changing transformation triggered by their abductions?  (Efforts are now being made to interview abduction experiencers willing to compare their current state of mind with how it was thirty  years ago.)

                   Has there been a significant shift in public attitudes toward supporting greater environmental protection? A 2024 Pew Research Poll shows that 73% of those interviewed “are sad about what is happening to the Earth.” But only  54% of Republicans (or those leaning Republican) answered that they are sad, in comparison with 91% of Democrats (or those leaning Democrat).[17] A 2023 Gallup Poll shows that “quality of the environment” ranks twelfth when compared with other major issues facing the country.[18] Anthropogenic climate change and/or global warming also rank toward the bottom of polls, especially in comparison with the demand for a stronger economy.

                  Millions of people have worked to enhance  environmental protection, but the biosphere remains threatened by capitalist economies serving the market demands of billions of people who want Hondas and smart phones and soon AGI. Moreover, nuclear proliferation and new weapons platforms now make the prospect of nuclear war greater than at any time since the end of the Cold War thirty years ago.[19] Arguably, the biosphere protection mission allegedly associated with alien abductions has not yet been achieved, even if consciousness-transformation on the part of many individual experiencers has been lasting. One experiencer recently suggested to me that experiencers may act as “tuning forks” who resonate with others in ways that expand their appreciation of the biosphere, the living Earth on which we all depend.

                   Allow me to make some personal remarks pertinent to these issues. I have been an environmentalist for fifty years. In the late 1970s I began publishing essays arguing that environmental problems are symptoms of a planetary mode of disclosing all being as raw material for enhancing  techno-industrial human power. Philosopher Martin Heidegger was the primary exponent of this view, which also influenced his famous student Herbert Marcuse in One-dimensional Man. A few years earlier, the late Holmes Rolston III had taken the first steps toward founding a new branch of applied philosophy: environmental ethics. By the early 1980s, while teaching one of the first environmental philosophy courses in the US, I had become deeply  engaged in the anti-nuclear war movement. In 1978, inspired by Ram Dass’s Be Here Now, I began to explore yoga, Zen, meditation retreats, Tibetan Buddhism, Vedanta, The est Training, Holotropic Breathwork, Jewish and Christian mysticism, Ken Wilber’s transpersonal philosophy, the works of critics of modernity such as Nietzsche and Heidegger, and so on.[20]  In many ways, as I was later to discover, my spiritual quest for individual and cultural awakening needed to avert human self-destruction paralleled that of John E. Mack, whom I first met in 1983 at a nuclear arms race conference in Washington DC. Little did we know that our lives would become entangled for the next  twenty years. Given that experiencers often say their abductions had initiated consciousness-expansion and have given rise to deep environmental concern, I wonder why it took me until a few years ago to wonder if I had been abducted. Given the close encounter reports from members of my family of origin, this may be a possibility.[21] 

                  Now let us return to Aspin’s discussion of how resistant people are to the very idea of alien abduction. He reminds us of how Supreme Court justice, Felix Frankfurter, reacted in 1943 to shocking reports he had received about Nazi extermination camps for Jews and other “subhumans.” While not denying the truth of claims made in such reports, Frankfurter said that nevertheless he could not believe them. That is, he was constitutionally incapable of accepting that a supposedly civilized Germany (home to Beethoven and Goethe and Einstein) was murdering millions of innocent civilians, all in the name of racial hygiene and a virulent anti-Semitism. Had such reports been less impossible to believe, perhaps the Allies would have taken more resolute steps, for example, by bombing railroads leading to the camps.

                  Many contemporary Americans will also find it difficult to believe that American law, science, and politics played crucial roles in justifying and formulating  Nazi race laws and white-supremacist ideology, which culminated in the horrors of the death camps. In Hitler’s American Model: The United States and Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton University Press, 2017), historian James Whitman shows that key elements of Nazi race law (established in 1935 in Nuremberg at a special meeting of the Reichstag) were drawn from racial statutes established by several American states with the aims of segregating blacks from whites and limiting the rights of black people. Such laws were often influenced by the (now discredited) science of so eugenics, developed in America during the early twentieth century.

                  According to eugenics, races exist, and some are superior to others.  Races can also “degenerate,”  due to factors such as miscegenation and failure to prevent the feeble-minded from reproducing. Many leading scientist and intellectuals, including presidents of major universities, promoted eugenics and its practices, including forced sterilization. During the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was at the peak of its influence and murderous race riots were occurring in various parts of the US. There was grave concern about whether whites, possibly already a degenerating race, would succeed in the coming global struggle against vigorous “colored” races in Asia and Africa. Growing hysteria led to demands for a widespread, government enforced breeding program. These long-forgotten facts call for us to think carefully about the nature and implications of any breeding (or hybridization) program promulgated without adequate justification by non-human aliens.   

                  Strieber’s Communion appeared a decade after Peter Singer published Animal Liberation (1975), which argued that animals deserve rights of their own, just as do women, blacks, and other marginalized human groups. Some people were still coming to terms with the idea of full rights for women and blacks. The notion of rights for animals was widely regarded as ridiculous. Also in 1975 Robert R. Griffin published The Question of Animal Awareness. He offered evidence that animals are conscious, aware, and sentient, that is, able to feel pain and pleasure. For most people, however, this was not news. Promoting such an idea, however, was unwelcome to those involved in factory farming of livestock, or b natural and medical scientists who were practicing vivisection.[22] 

                  Scientists justified vivisection in animal experimentation by citing a seventeenth-century metaphysical position developed by Descartes and his follower Malebranche, who argued that only humans are conscious and  sentient. The cries and whimpers of a live animal being cut open, so they argued, were analogous to the sounds made by rusty metal gears grinding against one another. (I am not making this up.)  In response to growing public outrage about practices justified by this attitude, Congress decided in the 1980s to required improvements in treatment of animals (and humans) used for federally funded research. Research universities were mandated to establish formal committees (including members from the non-university community) to  evaluate justifications for animal research and procedures aimed at minimizing pain and suffering. Our continuing exploitation of vast numbers of animals,however, undercuts the moral high ground on which we might otherwise stand in order to protest alien abduction and hybridization. How much more advanced or intelligent than us would aliens need to be for them to conclude that they have a right to abduct humans for purposes to which we lowly humans are not made privy?

                   Early modern natural science began by dividing reality into subjects (humans) and objects (everything else). Given its explanatory power, modern science gradually eclipsed the Biblical God, thereby leading to the nihilism about which Nietzsche warned. Techno-scientific modernity creates enormous wealth (for some) at the expense of the biosphere and perhaps our own spirit. Today’s science is revealing that humans are threads in a biospheric web constituted by trillions of interdependent terrestrial organisms. In addition, however, all those organisms experience that web in their own unique ways. The Earth’s massive material complexity is accompanied by its astonishing experiential depth. Dwelling just a bit on this fact can and ought to occasion wonder and awe, the wellsprings of philosophy and religion. We have never been alone. 

                  Many of those who have experienced abduction report becoming opened up to the interrelated experiential holarchy that constitutes the biosphere of which we are all expressions and by which we are all sustained. Perhaps urgency prompts aliens to intervene in ways that terrify and demean us but simultaneously occasion a shift in how we understand ourselves and our place in the larger scheme of things. There is another way of reading what “out of time” means, however. Perhaps abduction-triggered human awakening, which allows for deep appreciation of Earth’s material/organic/experiential interrelatedness, will come too late to avert environmental calamity.

                  There are good reasons to suppose, however, that the biosphere would carry on without us.

My thanks go to Karin Austin, Will Bueche, and Kimberly S. Engels for comments

that improved this essay. Remaining problems are solely my responsibility.

This is a work in progress. Critical comments and recommendations

for improvement are welcome

[1] Steve Aspin, Out of Time: The Intergenerational Abduction Program Explained. Surrey: Grosvenor Publishing House, 2023. OT is used for pagination.

[2]Reptiles have long played important roles in human mythology, as in the case of the wily serpent in the Garden of Eden. Non-human intelligence (NHI) may have been involved in human affairs for thousands of years. Atheists might be pleased if world religions arose from NHI intervention rather than from transcendental sources, but those non-believers would have to accept the reality of NHI, not easy for anthropocentric humanists who take for granted human superiority.

                  [3] See Roger Leir, MD, The Aliens and the Scalpel: Scientific Proof of Extraterrestrial Implants in Humans. Granite Publishing, 1999.

                  [4]  Joshua Cutchin, Ecology of Souls: A New Mythology of Death and the Paranormal, volume two, Horse and Barrel Press, 2022,  p. 27. See also Cutchin, Thieves in the Night: A Brief History of Supernatural Child Abductions, San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2018: “The ETH [Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis and the FFH [Fairy Faith Hypothesis] are clearly attempts to describe the same phenomena. The similarities are undeniable. Whatever its true nature, the UFO-faerie phenomenon constantly recontextualizes itself, adopting contextually appropriate representations when presenting itself. [….] Hybrid baby presentations are explicit reinventions of the [faery] changeling trope: a human child (or fetus) is taken and a grotesque, inhuman infant is presented to its parents instead.” (p. 238)

                  [5] Aspin, 185-186.

                  [6] Jason A. Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

                  [7] A notable exception is James Madden, author of Unidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the World. Ontocalypse Press, 2023. See also books by Michael Grosso, who received his PhD in philosophy from Columbia.

                  [8] Michael E. Zimmerman, “The ‘Alien Abduction’ Phenomenon: Forbidden Knowledge of Hidden Events,” Philosophy Today, 41, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), 235-253. https://www.academia.edu/37782252/The_alien_abduction_phenomenon_Forbidden_knowledge_of_hidden_events  See also my essay “Encountering Alien Otherness in ” The Concept of the Foreign, ed. Rebecca Saunders (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2002), 153-177.

                  [9] Whitley Strieber, The Fourth Mind. Santa Monica:  Walker & Collier, 2024, p 23.

                  [10] Whitley Strieber, Them.My emphasis.

                  [11] David Jacobs coined the term “hubrid” to name third-generation hybrids who have become increasingly human-like, and  who gradually replaced small alien greys in the abduction process).

                  [12] Quoted by Aspin, Out of Time, p. 198. Original essay found in Michael Lindemann, ed., UFOs and the Alien Presence: Six Viewpoints. Santa Barbara, CA: The 2020 Group, 1991.

                  [13] Strieber, The Fourth Mind, p. 108.

                  [14] John E. Mack, Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters. Guildford, UK: White Crow Books, 1999, p. 26. 

                  [15] Ibid., p.162.

                  [16] Strieber, The Fourth Mind, xv. My emphasis.

                  [17] Pew Research Center, December 6, 2024, “Republicans and Democrats differ in their reaction to climate change new,” https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2024/12/09/how-americans-view-climate-change-and-policies-to-address-the-issue/ 

                  [18] “Seven Key Gallup Findings About the Environment on Earth Day,” Gallup, April 22, 2024.  https://news.gallup.com/poll/643850/seven-key-gallup-findings-environment-earth-day.aspx

                  [19] Jon B. Wolfsthal, Hans Kristensen, and Matt Korda, “Why We Should Worry about Nuclear Weapons Again,” Washington Post, June 4, 2025. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2025/us-russia-nuclear-weapons-proliferation-danger/?utm_campaign=wp_week_in_ideas&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter

                  [20] An account of these explorations, and how they were often informed by my study of Heidegger’s philosophy, are found in my Afterword to Speaking Being: Werner Erhard, Martin Heidegger, and the Forum, by Bruce Hyde and Drew Kopp. Wiley, 2019.

                  [21] Michael E. Zimmerman, “Close Encounters in My Family of Origin,” Society for UAP Studies, October 23, 2024. https://www.societyforuapstudies.org/post/close-encounters-in-my-family-of-origin

                  [22] Ed Yong’s award-winning book, An Immense World (New York: Random House, 2022) provides evidence that all the world’s animals live in their own sensory “bubbles” which allow them to perceive, experience, and navigate “reality” in ways consistent with their survival and growth. In other words, animals have their own modes of “interiority”; experience is not limited to human beings, although we bring to the party our own language-informed consciousness that has tempted us to dominate the biosphere. The same techno-science that has enabled such domination is now revealing to us, however, that humans share the planet with countless intelligent, sentient, and goal-oriented animals. Zoe Schlanger has done the same for plants in The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. New York: Harper, 2024.Remember we have never been alone.

My thanks to Karin Austin and Kimberly S. Engels for helpful comments that improved this essay. Any remaining problems are solely my responsibility.