Did Alien Abductions Contribute to a Pedagogy of Finitude?

Michael E Zimmerman

January, 2026

Some time ago in conversation with Karin Austin (director of the John E. Mack Archives), I learned that alien abductions began a dramatic decline in the early 1990s and eventually ceased. Whitley Strieber generally agrees with this assessment, as does Steve Aspin, who recently published an insightful book (Out of Time) about his own abduction experience.[i] Even though some reports of abductions are still posted on-line forms, the number of abductions seems to have dramatically declined. The question is: Why?

         One answer would be that the aliens (who/whatever they may be) got what they wanted from us and then left. What did they want? Aspin, who shares a negative view of abductions with Budd Hopkins, David Jacobs, Karla Turner, and others like them answer that whatever the aliens wanted won’t be good news for us. Strieber has long been of two minds about the visitors, his term for aliens. At times he has described them as intrinsically horrible entities who want to devour our souls. He has also long suggested that abductions may have somehow been mutually beneficial to humans and the visitors. The possibility of establishing such a relationship is echoed in the title of his first book on abductions, Communion. (It is worth noting, however, that he initially considered using a different title: Body Terror.)

         During an abduction, experiencers report being seized by strange, four-limbed, big-eyed entities who usually offer no account for what they are doing or why; are taken aboard a room (often in a UFO) where they are probed, examined, and forced to take part in a humiliating and bizarre hybridization process; and finally are forced to undergo the “alien gaze” in which huge black alien eyes penetrate deep into their consciousness, already made vulnerable by unspeakable intrusions. Many experiencers feel as if they have been brought to the edge of death, never to return home. Following such traumatic episodes and the mind scan, many experiencers are shown horrendous visions of our planet in ruins, perhaps because of nuclear war. The apocalyptic visions, unaccompanied by comments or accusations, typically elicit revulsion, shame, and guilt.

         Kelly Chase, at her Substack venue Gods of the Gaps, has been exploring the issue of trauma, transformation, and revelation. In her December 10, 2025, post she remarks:

"Apocalyptic messages and visions are one of the strangest and most persistent patterns among anomalous experiencers of all types. People who have encounters with non-human intelligence—whether through abduction, downloads, contact, or altered states—often walk away with visions of a coming cataclysm. It’s one of the defining characteristics of these types of experiences, something that is more common than not.

"And although these visions often come from people who appear to have legitimate psychic gifts and who have other visions of the future that end up being wildly prescient, the apocalypse is the one prophecy that never comes to pass. [My emphasis.]"

https://godsofthegaps.substack.com/p/why-do-experiencers-have-visions

         John E. Mack, with whom I worked on this topic for a dozen years, had lengthy conversations with over 300 experiencers. According to him, the trauma of abduction often proves to be a portal akin to initiatory practices that lead to psychological and spiritual transformation. Initial terror, confusion, and resentment often gave way to a profound opening of consciousness, sometimes evoking a deep concern for planet Earth.[ii] Given that biospheric health seemingly matters to the aliens, this may explain why some experiencers conclude—to their astonishment--that “I am the alien.” Interpreting the full significance of this realization must postponed to another occasion

          Critics contend, however, that Mack’s previous exploration of consciousness expansion--The est Training, Holotropic Breathwork seminars, transpersonal psychology/philosophy, and so on --may have influenced how he framed abduction reports. This contention, however, may be ruled out by a study carried out by the Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Experiences (FREE). According to the FREE survey of thousands of experiencers, about 75% of them report a significant expansion of consciousness which they attribute to their abduction experience. This finding, however, does not prove that consciousness expansion was an outcome intended by the aliens; moreover, a minority of experiencers report no such expansion. Nevertheless, the finding is striking.

         Abductions began their steep decline when the Cold War ended in 1991 due to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The simultaneity of these two events suggests that they were related. Given the warnings so many experiencers received about nuclear war, perhaps abductions ceased because a key aim of abductions—avoiding nuclear war—was achieved. It is possible that the mind-expanding consequences of abductions (and there may have been millions of them) made some contribution to that crucial achievement. Verifying this possibility, of course, would be challenging and expensive. Moreover, even if abductions did help humanity to avoid nuclear war, a brief look at the world’s current state of affairs—wars, starvation, genocidal aspirations, racism, massive arms budgets, thousands of nuclear weapons still in place, slow violence against nature—suggests that the yearned for transformation of human attitudes has not yet occurred.

          Nevertheless, let us hypothesize (but not assert) that the traumatic aspect of abduction is an aspect of a “pedagogy of finitude,” seeking to liberate people from psychological and cultural patterns that promote conflict and exploitation, while also opening people to a more expansive and compassionate understanding of self and world. What are the patterns from which we need to be freed?

         delusions of grandeur,

         arrogance,

         death denying revolt against finitude/mortality,

         dualistic thinking,

         the tendency to project evil onto the enemy, and then to think that by killing the enemy we will destroy evil,

         heedless exploitation of the biosphere,

         an anthropocentric humanism that fails to respect the enormous intelligence and inherent significance of the web of life,

         a nihilistic, despair-inducing depiction of the universe as bereft not only of God and gods, but of any intelligence other than human,

         a flatland ontology that has no room for/explanation of  consciousness, and which thus depicts everything as mere matter in motion, without purpose, without meaning, without interiority, without depth,

          “official” rejection and repression of data regarding anomalous phenomena that are widely experienced, but much less frequently reported, lest they challenge the prevailing paradigm of anthropocentric humanism,

         fantasies of fleeing the human-trashed planet and migrating to other planets such as Mars—a dream that animates key players in Silicon Valley such as Elon Musk,

         the ancient hankering after an artificially enabled immortality, most recently on the part of transhumanists and techno-posthumanists like Ray Kurzweil.

         Awakening humankind from such entrenched attitudes, which most religious traditions would recognize as sources of suffering, would seemingly require an armada of UFO mother ships. If abductions promise to free us from (or at least moderate) self-destructive human behavior, what might the visitors want in exchange? In his recent book, The Fourth Mind, Strieber answers as follows. The visitors no longer exist within three-dimensional time. At some point they attained—possibly via techno-scientific interventions--a version of immortality which allows them to stand outside of time. Although this allows them to see far into the future, the cost may well have been very high. Seemingly they have lost vitality, capacity for surprise, spontaneity, emotional depth, creativity, and meaningfulness. The human-alien hybridization program (however this is to be defined) apparently sought in part to allow the visitors to regain some of what they lost. Perhaps they achieved some of this aim, but we have not been informed. Strieber argues that the differing brain/mind structures of visitors and humans make communication difficult (despite the occurrence of telepathy).Hence, any literal reading of UFO encounters and abductions must be tempered their symbolic, theatrical, ambiguous, and often Trickster-like aspects.

         Arguably, the visitors’ experience warns of the potentially dire consequences of seeking and acquiring immortality-enabling technology. Western history, in fact, is replete with such warnings, starting perhaps with the myth of Prometheus, the titan who created humankind. The chief Olympian god, Zeus, decided to withhold fire from humans, but Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans. Fire, which makes possible metallurgy as well as cooked food, is a symbol of technology. To punish Prometheus, Zeus had him chained forever to a rock, where an eagle would devour his liver every day, only to have it grow back by morning. Liver was regarded as the seat of emotions, which helps explain why this daily ritual was so painful. A key message of Aeschylus’ tragedy, Prometheus Bound, was that technological progress was an ambiguous gift, perhaps exemplified by how high-tech iron weapons wiped out those tribes stuck in the bronze age.

         Consider also the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, a massive, multi-storied building being constructed in Babylon so that people could reach the heavens, the dwelling place of God. What was the punishment for this striking ambition? Destruction of the tower, followed by elimination of a shared language, replaced by tens of thousands of different tongues. (Arguably, this punishment may be undone by virtually instantaneous computer translation and the shared mathematics of the many natural sciences.) More recently, Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s famous tragedy, Dr. Faustus, depicts the passion of a power-craving scientist who willingly trades his soul for knowledge. Millennia later “Promethean” and “Faustian” are still used to denote heedless technological ambitions.

         Needless to say, people have not paid much attention to such warnings, especially given that technological advance has long been viewed as a way of forestalling death. (On the nature and widespread presence of death denial in modernity, see Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death.) Death denial motivates many technological post-humanists hoping that by uploading their consciousness into super-advanced computers they will attain a kind of immortality. What could possibly go wrong? Ray Kurzweil has long had the (arguably macabre) aim of using AI and other advanced technology to literally bring his dead father back to life, literally Arguably, Kurzweil (whose name means “short while” in German) is gripped by melancholia resulting from unresolved grief. The widespread desire in Silicon Valley to trade in our disease-prone, weak, and mortal bodies for a virtually immortal and silicon-based and algorithmically structured existence may be read as a fantasy of highly-intelligent people who find body and emotions to be more than inadequate.[iii]

         Familiar with such death anxiety, I have been drawn to philosophical, religious, and other cultural efforts that appreciate the significance of embodiment and mortality.

         Philosopher Martin Heidegger, for instance, contends that death anxiety and the call of conscience remind us of our mortality, so that we can better care for things that really matter. What does death anxiety reveal? That we are a strange kind of entity that is never fixed, but is always an issue for itself, always open for possibility. We exist as no-thingness, as the clearing within which entities can reveal themselves and, in that sense, can “be.” If our essential openness is constricted by fear and arrogance, however, entities can reveal themselves only in constricted ways. Yet, if we own up to our mortality, that is, if we heed the call of conscience to be the mortal openness that we always already are, then we can let people and other entities show up as they are from their own side, rather than in  terms of our presuppositions and preferences. Heidegger spoke of this mode of existence as authenticity.[iv]

         Friederich Nietzsche encourages us to “remain faithful to the Earth” and to “die at the right time.” He warned that yearning for a transcendent afterlife, an idea that he attributed to Christianity, can negate the value of finite human existence. Jesus said, however, that the Kingdom of Heaven is not just a future promise but is within us and available here and now. Hence, even if there is a world to come, the point is to live this life appropriately. The resurrected Christ still bore the wounds that caused his death, revealing that our mortal lives are not to be spurned but rather are inherently meaningful and eternally significant.         

Don Juan Matus, the Mexican brujo described in books by Carlos Castañeda, urges him to “take death as your advisor.” Drop your pettiness, he said, and act in ways that allow you to “see” the mysterious world hidden by your own narrow preconceptions. For years I assigned Castaneda’s book, Journey to Ixtlan, for my Philosophies of the Self course, because of the remarkable overlaps between the teachings of don Juan and many of Heidegger’s ideas.

         Native Americans warriors would encourage one another by saying “This is a good day to die!” You have to die anyway, so why not make your death count in a way that you can be proud of? Many native Americans also spoke of “all their relations,” because they regarded humanind not as standing over other forms of life, bur rather as another worthy strand in the cosmic web.

         Mahayana uddhists assert that “This very [mortal] body is the body of the Buddha!” Don’t be thinking that the Buddha is someone over there—you are already endowed with everything it takes to awaken in this life, without reference to a transcendent nirvana. Everything is impermanent, so clinging to what changes is a source of suffering.

         Hopefully, it is not pointless to call on ancient, traditional, and even modern sources to provide guidance in today’s postmodern moment--and even less so in the post-human moment coming into view. When Nietzsche spoke of self-overcoming as a key requisite for the Overman, he did not—despite what some Silicon Valley enthusiasts maintain--envision self-conscious, self-improving human/computer hybrids that will vastly exceed anything possible for mere mortals.[v] UFO encounters as well as alien abductions exhibit (and sometimes even seem to flaunt) powers that far outstrip our own--as if to remind us that our quest for technological prowess will not overcome death. The UFOs will always be faster, the aliens will always be more powerful, and both will always be elusive. If the aliens invite us to evolve, that evolution may involve transforming the mortal, super-natural body, rather than fleeing from it. Aliens are not saviors, although by reminding us of our finitude, perhaps they provide us with what we need to help ourselves.

         How can a pedagogy of finitude and the call of conscience achieve their mission, however, when AI (and soon-to-come AGI) is dramatically retraining and redirecting our attention, while undermining our capacity for self-reflection? That pedagogy and call seem necessary for overcoming what Günther Anders—one of Heidegger’s best but least known students (at least in the Anglophone world)—began exploring the phenomenology of Promethean shame. Writing in the 1950s, he claimed that when faced with smooth-running, always improvable and repairable machines, we may experience inadequacy, even embarrassment by our embodiment—we are easily injured, slow to learn, and impeded by emotions.[vi]

         If Anders were alive today, he might speak of Promethean abdication. If computing machines (AI) are better at thinking, why should I bother doing so? If the TikTok feed is endless, why should I linger anywhere? If interiority has no metrics, why should I cultivate it? AI externalizes memory and even imagination, rewards immediacy, and thus marginalizes depth, patience, and inwardness. The decline in reading (and even in watching two-hour films) is both evidence of and contributory to such Promethean abdication. Today’s political siloes and hateful projection might be tempered if more people explored the life challenges and modes of suffering faced by their opponents. Surely, however, a pedagogy of finitude cannot succeed if we are so distracted that we conceal from ourselves the fact that we are alive to begin with. Meanwhile, high tech billionaires, yearn to trade in their hapless mortal bodies for something no longer bound to experience the grief, loss, and suffering that is the fate and dignity of mortals.[vii]

           If I take seriously the pedagogy of finitude, and if I heed the call of conscience, I conclude that I want to be anEarthling, a mortal who contributes as he is able to the well-being of people and planet, while recognizing that there higher, more inclusive, even divine planes in which we are nested.

         [i] See Whitley Strieber, The Fourth Mind, Walker & Collier Books, 2024. Steve Aspin, Out of Time: the Intergenerational Abduction Program Explored. Surrey: Grosvenor Publishing House, 2023. See my review of this book , “Alien Abduction: Even If True, Impossible to Believe?” https://www.societyforuapstudies.org/post/alien-abduction-even-if-true-impossible-to-believe

         [ii] Karin Austin (director of the John E. Mack Institute) and Kimberly S. Engels (associate professor of philosophy at Molloy University) are developing a research program aimed at comparing and evaluating the difference between how abductees experienced such consciousness expansion 25 or more years ago, and how they experience it today. For instance, what “staying power” did concerns about environmental protection have?

                  [iii] On attitudes toward death on part of many AI enthusiasts, see Rachel Edwards’ perceptive Substack post, “Death in the Age of AI: What are we trying to hold onto?” January 7, 2026.

         [iv] Michael E. Zimmerman, Eclipse of the Self: The Development of Heidegger’s Concept of Authenticity. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981.

         [v] See Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity. New York: Basic Books 2025.

         [vi] Günther Anders, Obsolescence of the Human, trans. Christopher John Müller. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021.         

         [vii] See Michael E. Zimmerman, “A Specter is Haunting Us: The Specter of Human Erasure,”  Society for UAP Studies, May 31, 2024. https://www.societyforuapstudies.org/post/a-specter-is-haunting-us-the-specter-of-human-erasure