Psychological aspects of the alien contact experience

Abstract

Previous research has shown that people reporting contact with aliens, known as "experiencers", appear to have a different psychological profile compared to control participants. They show higher levels of dissociativity, absorption, paranormal belief and experience, and possibly fantasy proneness. They also appear to show greater susceptibility to false memories as assessed using the Deese/Roediger-McDermott technique. The present study reports an attempt to replicate these previous findings as well as assessing tendency to hallucinate and self-reported incidence of sleep paralysis in a sample of 19 UK-based experiencers and a control sample matched on age and gender. Experiencers were found to show higher levels of dissociativity, absorption, paranormal belief, paranormal experience, self-reported psychic ability, fantasy proneness, tendency to hallucinate, and self-reported incidence of sleep paralysis. No significant differences were found between the groups in terms of susceptibility to false memories. Implications of the results are discussed and suggestions are made for future avenues of research.