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Beauty translated season three is coming soon with what? A second host. I'm Carmen Laurent, and this season I am joined full time by world renowned Janie Danger. Janie, what are we talking about in season three?

We're talking about life, Carmen. Beauty translated is about the many fragmented lives spreading across this rich tapestry of.

The trans experience and the all new beauty translated. Loveline at 678-561-2785 listen to beauty translated season three on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Bye. Welcome to stuff you should know.

A production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. And there's Chuck. And Ben's here again, too. It's pretty much the new status quo, which I have to say I like a lot. And that makes this stuff you should know.

Oh, I was about to say Jerry might get her feelings hurt, but, you know, she won't even hear that.

No, not a chance.

If she's, know, overseeing that episode, it's not like she goes, oh, I should listen in.

Yeah, I got to keep up with these guys. They're so hilarious. That's not a Jerry thing to think.

Yeah, especially when it's more alien stuff.

Yeah, we've done a lot of alien stuff, and by God, every second of it's been amazing. And I don't think this is going to be any different.

No. It's been a while, though. I felt like we kind of had a little grouping of those ten years ago or something.

I think it was like last year, but we did.

Was it really?

No, it was probably, like within the last two years, we did that two parter on Project Blue Book.

Oh, sure. I just remember years ago at Comic Con, didn't we do an alien thing there?

We did one on. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

That's a brave thing for us to do at Comic Con.

For sure. A lot of experts. So, yeah, today we're talking about something that definitely has a lot to do with aliens, a lot to do with UFOs, but also really has a lot to do with social psychology and sociology and history is a strange moment in time where there was a. You can almost call it a trend. And I want to say right from the outset, we are in no way, shape, or form mocking anyone who believes that they were abducted. After researching this, I fully understand that people who believe they were abducted by aliens are traumatized by that experience and show all the symptoms of a traumatic experience, and then on top of that, have the indignity of not being believed by anybody and probably talked down to fairly frequently. So we're going to try not to talk down. So, in calling it a trend, I'm not trying to diminish the experience of anybody who believes they were abducted and that it had an impact on their lives. But there was a period in time from about the 1960s and 70s through to the 90s, where there were a lot of people running around claiming to have been abducted.

Yeah, it's interesting. It's fascinating because it dawned on me when I was researching this. I haven't heard one of these in a long time.

No. And I looked up and saw a bunch of different places that people attribute that to the advent of ubiquitous camera phones.

That's inconvenient.

Yeah, exactly.

You can be like, no, this is what you saw. And it dried up at almost the exact same time.

Okay. All right.

That makes a lot of sense.

But before that, people have been seeing weird stuff in the sky and being like, UFO for a while. But in our project blue book episode, we found, like, the moment it really kicked off. And that was June 24, 1947. And we talked it up to a guy named Kenneth Arnold, who was, I think, an amateur pilot or, like, a hobbyist who saw what came to be considered the first flying saucer.

Yeah. And the alarming thing about this was he clocked the speed at about 1600 miles an hour, which is, at the time, easily three times faster than anything else could fly. And this is where the term saucer came from. He said they flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water. And so that's kind of where that term came from. And this is just after World War II. And it's not like no one had ever claimed to have witnessed anything before this, but basically, pre this date, it was 100%. Well, maybe not 100%. Who knows? But most people were saying, like, oh, that's just some enemy technology or something that we don't know about.

Yeah, so Kenneth Arnold kicked off what you characterized as, like, the modern UFO movement, I guess, right?

Yeah.

As in, there's an alien driving, not a.

Yes.

Yeah, good point. And also the thing that really bolstered it, within days of that, within two weeks, the Roswell crash happened, which a lot of people say that's the advent of the idea that aliens are actually visiting us and that the government is covering it up. Right. So those two things, it was a one two punch in 1947. In the summer of 1947, that really kind of just debuted aliens to the world. And one of the things, as we'll see with abduction narratives or stories or claims, they usually have a very dark, bad thread to them. They're not a positive experience. And aliens have kind of gotten, in large part, like, that kind of view by the public. If there are aliens out there, it's not entirely clear that they are benevolent or kind. That's not how it was at the outset, was it?

Yeah.

We can chalk that up to a dude named George Adamsky, I guess.

Adamsky, yeah.

He immigrated from Poland, and he founded a group called the Royal Order of Tibet in southern California in the 30s. He was a teacher of philosophy. He was kind of out there a little bit. And in 1952, he claimed that he met an alien named Orson, which is. It's got to be the inspiration from Orson for Mork. For mork.

Right.

Probably because these were really popular books at the time.

Yeah, I mean, it just sounds like you're saying Mortg calling Orthan with a lisp, or how I say it now with my tooth.

It's like Tyson calling Orphan.

But his narrative was a bit different. He was like, hey, this alien orthon was a beautiful man. He had a high forehead. He had hair, which is, as you'll see, pretty unusual from the grays that follow. And a uniform on, a brown uniform. And was telepathic, could speak to him basically through his brain and brought a message of peace, saying, hey, I'm from Venus, and you guys should stop with the nuclear weapons.

Right. So this was, like how people kind of viewed aliens visiting us at the time. Like, this guy was writing these books like they were nonfiction, and people were eating them up.

Yeah.

So there was this idea that, okay, aliens are kind of cool. They're more advanced than us, and they have our best interests in mind. And then that took a serious left turn just a few years later in the late 50s, when a farmer in Brazil named Antonio vs. Boas claimed that he had been taken aboard a spaceship. And Adamsky later claimed that he had been on a spaceship, too, but this was pretty new stuff, that he had basically been abducted and forced to have sex with what he admitted was an attractive alien, but was a bit turned off by the fact that she barked during sex and then returned to his farm. And this is new ground, essentially, that Boaz had started to Trod.

Yeah, for sure. I couldn't find an earlier one that mentioned any kind of sexual assault going on.

Right.

Was this the first one?

From what I could tell, yes.

All right.

So he, of course, went to a doctor. They examined him. They said he's probably making this whole thing up. But there was a group, an early UFO ology group, that published this experience anyway. And in 1965, it ran in an international journal called Flying Salsa review, which I got to get a copy of one of those. And all of a sudden, people all over the world are hearing this story and this sort know was happening. Know it was international, but it didn't hit the american public quite like the story of Betty and Barney Hill, which really, really kicked things off here in the States.

Yeah.

Because his thing came out in that journal in 1965. And the Hills had an experience in 1961. They are widely seen as the first credible abductees. If you believe in that kind of stuff, you probably are focused on Betty and Barney Hill. They were an interracial couple in 1961 in New Hampshire. Betty was a social worker and Barney was a postal officer. And they had taken a delayed honeymoon to Montreal and were on their way back when they noticed that they were basically being chased by a light in the sky. And when they grabbed their binoculars and stopped and got out of the car, they could actually see that it was essentially a flying saucer and that aliens were looking at them through the windows. And the next thing they know, it's 05:00 a.m. They're pulling into their house about 3 hours later than they had expected to. And Barney's shoes were scuffed and Betty's dress was torn, and they didn't know what had happened, but they were genuinely bothered by the.

And, you know, we'll dive in a little bit more with them. But the reason that you mentioned that they were an interracial couple is because they were doing a lot of work for civil rights and stuff like that. So all that to say, they had no reason to, in fact, every reason not to kind of come forward with this crazy story, given their positions of doing like this great civil rights work, because it would just all of a sudden, people would call them kooks. And probably cast doubt on the genuine good work they were doing. So they had no reason to make something like this up.

And everything to lose, too.

Yeah, everything to lose. So they're trying to figure out and make sense of what had happened to them, because, again, as you'll see with all these stories, whether or not this happened or not almost doesn't matter in some cases, because the trauma that's visited upon them afterward is very much real, just like any kind of potential false memory. So Betty starts researching, goes to the library, and starts looking at books from the NICAP, which we've talked about before. Yeah, NICAP, the National Investigations Committee on aerial phenomenon. And that was some retired military officers and UFO enthusiasts who had gotten together this pretty early research group. And afterward, they were suffering from PTSD, especially the husband. He had pretty severe anxiety from this.

Yeah, he did. Betty had trouble sleeping. Barney had a bunch of just. They were affected by this experience, and they had this missing time that they knew they couldn't account for, and they wanted to know what happened. So they were earnestly trying to look for somebody to help explain what had happened to them and why their lives were affected. First, they went to the military and followed official channels because this is when Project Blue Book was an actual thing. And you were encouraged to report any UFO sighting to the military because they were investigating it. And the military was like, this is not an important story. Sorry, guys, we can't help you. So they turned to their church. And apparently their church was like, this is way out of our league. Yeah, maybe you saw God. And they're like, no, it wasn't God. They're like, yes, sorry, we can't help you either. So they turned to psychiatry, and a psychiatrist named Benjamin Simon agreed to help them. And this is a time where there was a good chance you were going to be hypnotized if you were on a psychiatrist's couch. This is the early to mid 1960s.

And so they were hypnotized over a series of sessions, and all of a sudden, these memories that had been repressed, that covered that chunk of time that they couldn't account for, started to come forward.

That's right. Which was abduction. Little gray creatures. This is sort of the beginning of the stereotypical gray as we know them. Gray little skinny bodies. The big heads, the big oval eyes. They brought them on board the spaceship and did the usual kind of stuff, which is, let me probe you, let me sample you. Apparently, they put a needle into Betty's stomach, which is what they assume was like a pregnancy test. They were very entranced by Barney's dentures. And then they wiped their memories out, I guess, men in black style. And that's where the lost time comes from. And these were real deal, super emotional hypnosis sessions with a very qualified psychiatrist. But even after all that, the psychiatrist, Simon, was like, I don't know. I think they have a shared delusion going on.

Exactly. Yeah.

So he was like, you guys weren't abducted, but you both believe you were abducted, and it's having an effect on you. He actually drilled down a little further and suggested that it was actually latent racial tensions that existed in their marriage that they weren't equipped to deal with and were purposely kind of subverting into these weird alien fantasies. But that really, that's what it was. And they were like, no, dude, you're wrong. We were abducted. All of these memories are real. And he's like, have you heard of false memories? And the hills were like, no, we haven't. And they just kept moving on. So the psychiatry couldn't help them, either. And as they went further and further along trying to get answers, they kind of were pushed further and further out of the mainstream and toward the fringes, where they were welcomed with open arms.

Oh, of course, the story got published in 1965. A guy named John Lutriel from the Boston Traveler reported on this. UPI picks it up, and then a guy named John G. Fuller made it into a book in 1966 called the Interrupted Journey, two lost hours aboard a flying saucer, which eventually became a TV movie in 1975 called the UFO Incident, which you can watch on YouTube if you want to see a relatively young and pretty in great shape. James Earl Jones.

Yeah, it's a good movie.

Did you watch it? I kind of scrubbed through it looking for the good stuff.

I didn't watch it this time. I watched it when I was younger, for sure.

Yeah, most of the movie, 85% of it looks like it takes place in the psychiatrist's office for sure. And I didn't see just scrubbing through any good alien stuff till kind of toward the end. I guess they just wanted to wait for the big reveal or whatever. But Estelle Parsons plays the wife. And Barnard Hughes from Doc Hollywood, he was the old doctor in Doc Hollywood played Simon. And it was a big deal movie, and it was know it's a TV movie at a time when TV movies were big. If you're around these days and you're not familiar with how things were back then, a big TV movie like this could be sort of a national phenomenon.

Yeah.

Because you had a very limited amount of choices of what to watch on any given night. So if there was a big TV movie, they promoted the heck out of it, and the whole country could be talking about it for the next couple weeks. You'd be reading about it in the newspaper. It would be a big deal. Right?

Yeah.

And this was a big deal, too. You mentioned that there wasn't much alien stuff in there. And apparently Betty Hill was very disappointed that James Earl Jones and the producers had kind of taken this story that to her was a legitimate alien abduction story and used it to explore the themes of, like, interracial marriage, civil rights, being black in a largely white state, Barney's general experiences, being a black man in the. She was like, yeah, that probably has something to do with it. But really, we need more aliens.

Right?

It's hard to argue with that.

Exactly. It had a huge effect, too, because it kicked off. So everything we know about alien abductions, the whole narrative, the whole thread, all of the claims that followed, are based largely on Betty and Barney Hill's experience.

Yeah.

And it should come as no surprise that after that movie airs, a lot more of these stories start to pop up. Very famous one. Just a couple of weeks later, after the movie aired. 1975 is when the logger, Travis Walton in Arizona was beamed up into that spaceship, became a movie. Fire in the sky. In 1993, he was gone for about a week, came back, said that he was examined by what we would now call the grays, little short baldies. And things really start to ramp up almost in lockstep with stories ramping up, if that makes sense. We're kind of feeding each other.

Yeah.

By the way, Travis Walton was roundly exposed as a hoaxer, and so was everybody in his group. And they saw it attributed to his boss, the head of this logging company, wanting to get out of an unlucrative contract with the federal government. So they concocted this story.

What's a good way to do that?

Yeah, that is so 70s. That's how you would get out of contract.

Not a bad movie, though. Fire in the sky was pretty good.

I never saw it.

Yeah, it's not bad. DB Sweeney?

Yeah.

Was he on Saturday Night Live?

Why do I think that you're thinking there was another Sweeney?

Julius Sweeney. I know, but I thought DB Sweeney was, too. Maybe I'm conflating Julius Sweeney and Ge Smith in the Saturday Night live band and coming up with DB Sweeney.

Maybe. So ge Smith was great.

Yeah, I saw Ge Smith in the Saturday Night live band. Backing up. Holla notes at the first ever concert I ever saw.

Now, my friend, I knew you went and saw Holland Oates. I did not know that Ge Smith was in the SNL band.

Was the band, yes. And I think it was the sax player who wore, like, the floor length mink coats, like the whole shebang. It was like they took the Saturday Night live band, and that's who was touring with Holland Oates.

And Oates was like, can you tone it down and get rid of that coat?

It's competing with my hair and mustache.

All right, I think we should probably take a break. Yay.

Yay.

All right, and we'll be right back and talk about more grays right after this.

Beauty translated season three is coming soon with what? A second host. I'm Carmen Laurent, and this season I am joined full time by world renowned Janie Danger. Janie, what are we talking about in season three?

We're talking about life, Carmen. Beauty translated is about the many fragmented lives spreading across this rich tapestry of the trans experience.

Janie, this sounds like an all new format.

Podcasting two is finally here.

Thoughtful perspectives on current events, stunning, sexy.

Bold interviews with an all star lineup.

Of guests, and the all new beauty translated loveline, the first ever be a.

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All right, so that was in the. But basically, from the 50s on through the 70s, there were all kinds of encounters, and there were a lot of different kinds of aliens that people were reporting, ranging from a headless wing bat kind of thing in England to a pointy eared, glow eyed creature in North Carolina. And this is when UFO research groups who very much want people to believe that UFOs and aliens are real, I get the feeling behind the scenes they're like, guys, we got to consolidate around a look here because all these weird aliens that people are reporting are not doing ourselves any favors, basically. So can we settle on the grays? And they did.

Yeah.

And somehow or another, that is exactly how it happened. And it ended up in mainstream pop culture, being adopted like that, where as the Grays became more and more widespread, it was like a positive feedback, where more people portrayed aliens as the Grays because that's what aliens looked like. And it just kept spreading from there until the general, streamlined understanding of what aliens looked like was the grays over time. And I just want to point out that probably the greatest X Files episode of all time, Jose Chung's from Outer Space, turns this process on its head, where there are two gray aliens that turn out to be human actors in costumes who themselves have an actual, legitimate alien encounter with an alien that looks like one of the just bizarre kind from the 50s. It has fur, it's a cyclops with a horn, and it has, like, chicken legs, and that's, like, the actual alien. And I just think that's just as sharp as can be that they took that thread and just twisted it around.

I don't remember that episode. I was not an X Files watcher at the time. When it aired. I got into it in the. Although, when did it stop?

Do you know, like the early 2000s?

Okay, well, it was syndicated while it was still going then, I guess because I started watching reruns in syndication in like 97, and I don't even know if I kind of started at the beginning and watched it all the way through. But when I was living in New Jersey, I ended up watching a lot of X Files and enjoyed it quite a bit.

This is a standalone episode. You don't have to know anything that's going on to enjoy it. If you do know what's going on, it's even more enjoyable. But Jose Chung is this science fiction author who has a book or something called from outer space, and he's played by Charles Nelson Riley. There's stories of the men in black showing up, and the men in black are played by Alex Trebek and Jesse the body Ventura as themselves, but they're men in black. Yeah. It's an amazing episode. It's so great.

I definitely don't remember that one.

You need to go see it. It's really worth it.

All right.

It's worth your 44 minutes of your time.

Were you into X Files from the beginning, like live run or whatever?

Pretty much, yeah. When I watch it now, though, originally I was like, God, get this stupid monster stuff out of this. Get back to the alien. I love conspiracy, right?

Yeah.

Now as a grown up, I'm like, that alien conspiracy thing is so played out. I really enjoy the monster of the week episode more.

Yeah, I think the mix of the two was kind of what made it so great.

Yeah, it was very smart.

All right, so the other thing we should mention about the grays is that when Betty, at one point, they had her recreate a star map that the aliens who captured her had shown her. And when she described what she had seen, a lot of people said it sounds a lot like Zeta reticuli, which is a star system about 39 light years from Earth. And so you might hear them called grays. But if you ever hear anyone in the biz, I guess, refer to the aliens as zeta reticulans, that comes from that.

Yeah.

And like we said, a lot of just the basics of alien abduction stories were founded by the hills, unaccounted for, missing time, being abducted, being probed, sore butthole. Yeah, exactly. All that stuff originally with the hills, but it formed the basis or foundation that other people to come just kind of slowly built on. And there was one person who contributed quite a bit, an artist from New York named Bud Hopkins, who said that he had a close encounter, I guess it would be of the second kind, where they just saw, like, a flying saucer over Cape Cod. But it was enough of an experience that he kind of became. I don't know if obsessed is the right word, but deeply interested in the idea of UFOs and aliens. So he started kind of researching the whole thing and ended up writing a book in 1981 called I got to take a deep breath. Missing time. Colon documented stories of people kidnapped by UFOs and then returned with their memories erased.

Yeah, he didn't want to leave anything to chance as far as people misunderstanding what his book was about.

Yeah.

Colon, does that make sense?

Right, Colin, I'm talking about aliens, baby. So that was a pretty big book, and it established that pattern that we've been talking about of these abduction stories where you see the UFO and sometimes you don't remember anything and you just wake up in bed or whatever. Not accounting for the time. There was a young woman in the book. It was the first time that anyone had claimed to have been abducted twice. A young woman named Virginia Horton when she was six. Well, I guess she was a little girl then, and then at 16 years old. And this also follows a pattern in that in the second one, she followed a deer into the woods and then woke up at home with a bloody nose. And following an animal into the woods is a story that pops up kind of quite a bit when you're talking about alien abduction.

Yes, exactly. So one of the other things that Bud Hopkins contributed was the idea that people were being repeatedly abducted. Some people were. And that he's like, probably what's going on is they're being impregnated, and then they give birth, and then this hybrid alien human baby is born, and that's really what's going on here.

And then they take that baby.

Yeah.

But I think he also suggested that this was for the benefit of the human race, that they were actually benevolent, as brutal, or, I guess, uncomfortable as their tactics may have seemed.

Yeah, for sure. So things are really cooking at this point. Finally, we get to a very popular book. There was a guy named Whitley Stryber, who was a writer already, and this really helped the fact that he was already a writer and had the backing of publishers. Get this book out there. But he was a horror and science fiction writer, and in 87 published the book Communion, which had, if you look up the COVID of Communion, the illustration that was done by Ted Jacobs along with Striber, because he was like, this is what I saw. You got to draw this. That is as stereotypical alien head as you could imagine on the COVID of this very popular book.

Yeah.

Like, if the Grays had kind of been percolating throughout pop culture, this is where all those different threads got pulled into one alien image. And then from that moment on, that's essentially what the Grays looked like, that cover illustration, because it was just such a widely read book. And Stryber says, and always has said, from what I can tell, he's never broken character if this was a hoax. He's never, ever even intimated that it was. He said that until he started realizing that he had been abducted, he had never really been much into aliens, had never done much research. So he was giving the impression that all of his accounts were fresh. He went into them fresh. Like George Costanza.

Right.

He didn't know what he was talking about when he was writing about this. This was a legitimate memory. And as he remembered more and more and more, he realized that this had been going on since childhood and that entire chunks of his life were fabricated memories that had been implanted by the aliens that abducted him to cover up the memories of his actual abductions and what they were doing to him on their ships. And so in addition to that cover alien image of the Grays, one of the big things that Whitley Striber contributed to the whole, I guess, phenomenon is the idea of screen memories that no longer was it just missing time. You might not be missing time. You might not even remember having been abducted, but you just knew you'd been abducted. And if you thought about it enough or if you went and tried to get to the bottom of your repressed memories, those screen memories would fall away and the true memories of your abduction would bubble up to the surface.

Yeah.

And it was a very big book. It became a movie in 1989, a Christopher Walken movie. I pretty sure I saw it back then. I don't know if I saw it in theater or not. It feels like a VHS movie to me.

Yeah, for sure.

But Walken played him. If you look up the trailer on YouTube, it's a terrifying trailer. It's really unsettling. You should watch it with the music and everything. They portray it as like a horror movie, basically. But he is one that also striber, that is, who never also claimed officially that they were space aliens. He was just like, hey, this happened to me. I'm not saying they're space aliens, necessarily. He actually said they could come from another dimension or maybe it could be something else. I know in one of our UFO episodes, I talked about the fact that there are some people who think that the grays are just humans from the future, and that's what we eventually evolve to look like, because our brains get bigger and bigger, so our head's bigger and the actual outer ear is superfluous to the real hearing mechanism. So that's why they don't appear to have ears or noses. They just have ear holes and nose holes as we go on. The eyes are supposedly getting bigger as we evolve. So that's one theory, right?

Or another one is that they're from another dimension, not necessarily from space. One of the other things that Stryber contributed was the idea that you would be probed analy or sexually, in some way, shape or form. Remember Boaz, the brazilian farmer, was the one who contributed being sexually assaulted aboard a spaceship?

A UFO by a hot, barking alien woman.

Exactly.

Yeah.

But apparently most scholars trace the anal probe trope to Whitley Stryber. He said that there was a large object with a network of wires on the end that was inserted into his rectum. And what's interesting is that bears a strange resemblance to what Barney Hill claimed, too. He said that he had been analy probed and that there was a needle with a network of wires or something along that line. He didn't use that exact phrase, but that it had been left out of the book by John G. Fuller. That detail had it only showed up in a 1965 NICAP report, so it wasn't well known at the time. Although it's entirely possible that if Whitley Stryber was a hoaxer, you can imagine as a writer, he would have done enough research to go back and read a 1965 report about the quintessential abduction experience.

Yeah.

And as far as the anal probe goes, I've given this a lot of thought over the years, why that's always a thing, and the only thing I could come up with is that there are only so many holes, there are only so many areas of entry in your body, and there are reports of nose probes and bleeding noses and stuff like that. And I think the hidden nature of the butthole might entice aliens to be like, they see the nose, they see the ears, they see all the obvious ones, and then there's like, ooh, there's a hidden one.

Right.

Like, what treasure awaits us?

Yeah.

That's universal. Not just among humans, but around the universe. Like, what is in that butthole? Yeah, that's a great theory. I like that. That's just kind of like a little like a lot of people chalk that up to Whitley Strybert, which may or may not be correct, but that is interesting. That was 1989 that the movie community came out, what did you say, 1987 for the book that had a huge effect. The X Files, like we said, came along and took all this stuff. Like, if you watch the X Files back then or now or whenever, all of this is just so familiar. Like, Chris Carter apparently read up on the abduction phenomenon and just turned it into different. Right.

So pure gold.

Yeah.

And so that just spread it out into the pop culture even further. And then there was a guy named John Mack, who was the head of Harvard's psychiatry department, who was far and away the most credentialed person to come out and say, I'm pretty sure these people are telling the truth in some way, shape, or form.

Yeah.

And everyone was like, you sure you want to go out with this?

Yeah.

And he did very bravely. He was one of those people who railed against science, just kind of having its own dogma and keeping its head in the sand about things it couldn't explain. He didn't like that very much. So that kind of fit with his vibe, from what I can tell. But he kind of lent a little bit of legitimacy, especially if you were on the fringes. The fact that he was saying this stuff just gave you so much support right then.

Yeah.

He had a book in 94 about 13 different abduction cases called abduction human encounters with alien parentheses. Btw, I teach at Harvard.

Right?

Did I mention?

Yeah.

So I say we take another break and come back and talk about what scholars who don't buy the fact that these are actual alien abductions make of all this.

Yeah, it gets pretty interesting after this.

I think.

Beauty translated season three is coming soon with what? A second host. I'm Carmen Laurent, and this season I am joined full time by world renowned Janie Danger. Janie, what are we talking about in season three?

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Okay, Chuck, there's a couple of nuts and bolts things you should know about UFO subculture, and it's so extensive and it's been around for so long, and the people who are into it are so into it that just by glossing over it, we're probably going to get stuff wrong. Or we're just going to walk past some stuff. We're not experts. We've never claimed to be experts. And we're not experts of UFO subculture, so just want to caveat. That probably should have said that at the outset of this episode. But in UFO subculture, from the research I've seen, you can kind of divide people into two groups. One are contactees, people who have met aliens, and the other is abductees. And those are people who have been taken by aliens. And if you'll remember back to our project Blue Book episode, there was an astronomer named Jay Allen Heineck who was a debunker of UFOs until he just became a true believer. He's the guy who came up with the close encounters classifications. He left off with close encounters of the third kind, contact. What abductees brought to that was close encounters of the fourth kind, where you were taken against your will into a spaceship.

And among those two different groups, there's two very different views of aliens between contactees and abductees.

Yeah, for sure. If you're a contactee, you're much more likely to relate a positive experience. Basically. I think a lot of the contactees I've read that they feel like. They're, like a feeling of being chosen in a good way. Abductees, it's kind of the other way around. There's all kinds of stories of probing non consensual encounters, medical procedures going on. All the stuff that you hear about shoving things in different holes of your body are not positive experiences for most abductees. And it's really interesting, I think, that the contactees can feel, like, chosen or touched, whereas the abductees feel violated.

It is.

It's super interesting. There's also kind of a subgroup of abductees. Those are the people who have no memory of being abducted, but they're sure that they were abducted. They probably have unaccounted time in their life that they can look back on and think, like, what happened there? They just get the sense that they're abducted, too. Right? Yeah.

Which is interesting.

It is super interesting. The thing is, this is really important. I saw this in a lot of different places with people who research UFO abductees. They say that there are definitely people who are hoaxsters. There are definitely people who have serious mental illness and are actually delusional. But that, by and large, on the whole, UFO abductees are sane, sincere, genuine people who truly believe that they were abducted by aliens and whose lives have been, in a lot of cases, wrecked by it because they display the symptoms of trauma. They have post traumatic stress disorder symptoms from being abducted. And so if you're, like, well, I don't really buy any of this as being alien in nature. How would you explain it? And so sociology and psychology have set about trying to explain it, and neither one's really kind of rung the bell fully yet.

Yeah, for sure. There's plenty of research that's been done, even though, like you said, they haven't come to a great conclusion about it. But abductees their memories. The idea is if you're an abductee or you claim to be an abductee, then you're probably more prone to false memory. And there are some different tests they can do. One is called the Dees Rodiger McDermott task DrM. And that's where they give you a bunch of words that are sort of linked together. But there's a one word, they call it a lure word that's missing. So Livia put together an example of snooze, blanket, snore, dream pillow, bed. They don't use the word sleep in there. Very key. But obviously, that's the one lure word that's missing. And the people that are asked to sort of recount this, and if they insert the missing word that was never mentioned, like if they say sleep, then they're saying, all right, well, you're more susceptible to a false memory because we never said sleep.

Yeah, that's exactly how they present it, too, at the end of the study. It's very humiliating. But, yeah, that's kind of one of the general premises that people who believe that they were abducted by UFOs and whose lives are really affected by it negatively just are more susceptible to generating false memories. And some research backs that up. There have been studies that show that they do report more critical lure words than other people who don't believe they were abducted. Other studies say, we tried the same thing and found no difference whatsoever between the two, but we did find differences in other psychological traits, like disassociativity. Reality seems unreal to you. Absorption, which is a predisposition to get deeply immersed in sensory or mystical experiences. The likelier to have paranormal beliefs, likelier to believe that they have psychic abilities, fantasy proneness, difficulty differentiating between fantasy and reality, and a tendency to hallucinate. So these people are like, no, it's not proneness to developing false memories. It's all these other traits that are basically, they're luring these people into this kind of fantasy world that they're not distinguishing from reality and that that essentially has become part of their life to them.

They've adopted that as part of their life. Those seem to be the two dominant rival psychological explanations for this.

Yeah.

And there's another sort of. Not sort of, it sounds incredibly cruel test that was done, or a study rather, when they got kids together, either seven or eight year olds or eleven and twelve year olds, and they said you were abducted by an alien when you were four years old. In fact, here's your mom and she's going to reinforce this by telling you this happened. And here's a fake newspaper. Well, they don't say fake, but here's a newspaper report that talks about these abductions being pretty common. It's totally made up, of course. And then if these children go on to describe a lot more detail about the memory of being abducted when they were four years old, then they're classified as having false. I just. I can't believe that they were allowed to get away with doing that.

Yeah.

From what? This one, I think a british psychological association or society article found that they could find two studies that tried to implant false abduction memories into kids. One was from 1984 and they actually ascribed abductions to basically suppressed or repressed memories of being born. And then this one from 2009 with oatgar and friends. Right. And, yeah, it's deeply unethical. And they debriefed the kids. They said, no, this is all just a study or whatever, so don't walk around thinking like this actually really happened to you. But who knows if that really worked. But it raised a really important point. It really, as unethical as it was, showed how easy it is for false memories to be implanted, especially if you are being told that by someone in a position of authority like your psychologist or therapist or psychiatrist.

Right. Yeah.

And there's a really big rift in the field of psychology and psychiatry between whether traumatic memories can be repressed and if so, that means they can probably be recovered through good therapy or if you don't actually repress traumatic experiences and that if you do try to recover memories, what you remember is going to be false memories that are accidentally implanted. So that whole premise that you have missing time and that if you go see a therapist who's sympathetic and understands what you're going through, they will help you recover those memories. It strongly suggests that all those are our false memories, even though, again, they're causing real, legitimate pain in these people's lives.

Yeah, for sure. And I know we talked about this in maybe Project Blue book, but some others. As far as what else? This could be why you're having these false memories and sleep paralysis always seems to come up. We did an episode on this about 15% of the population experiences. It's when you wake up in the middle of the night, you can't move. You might hear some buzzing sounds. You might see flashing lights. You almost always, it seems like, see pretty frightening, shadowy figures in your room maybe hovering above you or at the foot of your bed. So sleep paralysis could explain some of this, or theoretically, it could. And then another one, which is interesting as far as a hypothesis goes, is magnetic disturbances by plate tectonics that are causing hallucinations. And this is what's really interesting to me. Distorted recollections of medical procedures while you're under anesthesia, like as you're going out. I think anyone who's ever done the twilight sleep thing or major surgery, when you're fully under that six or 7 seconds where you're laying there with a bright light above you and people hovering over you, it gets weirder and weirder, and people think that this could be associated with that because a lot of the people who had reported abductions had undergone surgery recently.

Yeah, that's pretty interesting as far as coincidences go. That's anesthesia awareness. And I think we did a whole episode on it. The idea that you can have memories if you're not under quite enough and that if it's a medical procedure. Yeah, you could remember that as aliens probing you or whatever.

Sure. Yeah.

That's what it feels like.

Yeah, I would guess so, for sure. I just remember being like, man, I'm so wasted. And reminding myself, like, oh, yeah, I'm allowed to be. These people got me wasted.

Right.

Sociology, for their part, has done some study, too, and just kind of quickly, what they've come up with is that if you are very religious, you're probably less likely to believe in aliens and even less likely to believe you were abducted by aliens. But if you are untrusting of the government, you're far likelier, to no surprise.

Yeah.

To believe that you were abducted by aliens.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And also the fact that. Who is it? Joseph O. Baker is a sociologist who studies this stuff a lot. And he's like, post Watergate, you saw a lot of this stuff happening, and that's when a lot of people had big distrust of the government. So there's a correlation there, at least for sure.

And then I say we wrap it up on that study by Bud Hopkins, the artist who got real deep into abduction lore.

Yeah, let's do it. Okay.

So in the 90s, Bud Hopkins worked with some academics and came up with, like, a legitimate random survey that sought to see how many of the population, like, what percentage of the population, believes they were abducted. And they came up with a questionnaire that got to the bottom of whether somebody felt like they had experienced five different aspects of abduction. Right. Waking up paralyzed with a sense of strange presence in the room, losing an hour or more of time that lost unaccounted for time, feeling of flying, which could also correlate with witchcraft, seeing strange lights in a room and then finding odd scars on your body and being like, I have no idea where the scar came from.

Yeah.

So they did that. This is in the early 1990s. They controlled the data or did some controlling for the data, and they found that 2% of the sample had four of those five related experiences happen to them, which is about 3.7 million Americans. That number. I think ufologists and people who study this stuff say that number is really high. It's probably more like thousands. But 3.7 million people experience at least four of those five things.

Yeah.

So a lot of people use that in articles and stuff on that. Like, 3.7 million is a big number. But I just want to point out they had a really ingenious way of separating out the fibers. From the outset, one of the questions was, does the word trondant have special meaning for you? And about 1% of respondents said yes. That really does. You know what I'm talking about? And Trondan is a made up word that they use to catch fibers. And I think Trondan is, like, a really great band name, too, especially because of the background at has.

Yeah, space rock.

Good one. You got anything else?

No.

Yeah, I mean, the whole thing's still ongoing. There's plenty of people out there who believe they were abducted, and psychology is still struggling to get to the bottom of it fully. So hopefully it will. So it can help all those people whose lives are affected by it negatively.

Yeah.

And at the very least, we've gotten some fun movie and TVs out of it, for sure.

If you want to know more about alien abductions, there's a lot to read out there, and you can do that. And in the meantime, we're just going to go ahead and have listener mail.

Hey, guys. Been listening since 2013. Since then, you've been with me through college graduation, brain surgery.

Wow.

A wedding, COVID at my teaching career, IVF, and our new baby.

Wowie.

Since Amber was born last July, I've been catching up on missed episodes in August 2023. I think you had a couple of EPs about language acquisition. This is so in my wheelhouse because I'm a middle high school spanish teacher and it made me think of this anecdote relating to language acquisition. I frequently pepper Spanish into my daily vocabulary and also hate squirrels. This is right up your alley, Josh. I frequently refer to them in Spanish. One day last summer, I asked my husband, who's a gringo, what he thought the spanish word for squirrel was. He hesitated and then guessed Bindejo. I'll let you look up what that word actually means, but it's definitely not squirrel. After listening to the parasocial relationship episode, I got too embarrassed to tell you this anecdote right away after the language episodes, but I decided to send it anyway. Now currently listening to the 2023 Halloween special and hope to be caught up by June. And that is from Becky Hill.

Thanks a lot, Becky, and congratulations to you and your husband on the birth of Amber. And from what I know about Ben Dejo, that's a pretty accurate term for squirrel.

Yeah.

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We're talking about life, Carmen. Beauty translated is about the many fragmented lives spreading across this rich tapestry of.

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The world is full of magic and wonder if you know where to look, and I'm obsessed with looking for it. I'm Simon Sinek and I host a podcast called a bit of optimism. Each week I have a short conversation with someone who inspires me or teaches me something about life, leadership, and other curious things. I hope you'll join me on the journey. Listen to a bit of optimism on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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