The Truth Is in There

Susan Clancy on recovered memories, alien abductions, and how to believe weird things.

Kerry Howley | December 8, 2005

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Reason: Do false memories differ in any perceptible way from actual memories?

Clancy: No. My colleague Richard McNally and I looked at psycho-physiological reactivity in people who believe they were abducted by aliens. We wanted to know whether when people are remembering their false memories, their bodies react the same as when they're remembering things that actually happened. So we compared psycho-physiological reactivity in alien abductees while they were remembering their alien abduction experiences and people who experienced actual traumatic events like rape victims and Vietnam vets—and they react the same.

Reason: How prevalent is belief in recovered memories? Are they still commonly accepted as evidence in legal proceedings?

Clancy: Yes. It is unbelievable. All of the scientific research shows that repression is just preposterous. But most therapists believe that repression exists. And most people in the world believe that the concept of repression is real. I think that's because of movies and Hollywood, we see it depicted, it's just culturally out there.

Reason: But in the scientific community—

Clancy: It's dead. Dead, dead, dead. For five decades we've known that memory is reconstructive in nature; we've known that memories can be created. The whole issue of repression didn't become a hot topic until the 90s. And for the past ten years scientists have been arguing that repression is preposterous.

Reason: You deny the existence of recovered memories; how do you explain the fact that adults do sometimes suddenly remember being abused, and the accounts turn out to be accurate and traumatic?

Clancy: Ninety-five percent of child sex abuse cases are non-traumatic events, traumatic in the sense of being life threatening or physically painful. If you look at the data, what is most likely to happen to victims involves touching and kissing. It's not something that requires medical attention. The average age of sexual abuse victims is seven. You take a young kid who does not know about sex—no kid under ten is able to understand what sex is—you have a child who doesn't know about sex, and somebody they love and trust is touching them in a way that is not painful. Put yourself in the perspective of the victim. There is no way to understand what is happening to you is a crime. They just don't know. It becomes one of the millions of experiences kids have that they don't understand. And it's not surprising to me that many kids simply don't think about it until later on in life. At some point, later on, when they hit puberty in high school or college, they put two and two together, and they realize that it was wrong. It was abusive. And people refer to that as "I remembered."

The other thing is the perpetrator is almost always somebody the victims knows and trusts. In almost all cases it is a family member, or teacher, or camp counselor, or priest, somebody in authority the kid loves. For most of the victims, it's the breach of trust that's traumatizing. And for a lot of kids, it's that they liked it at the time. And you can see how people feel shameful and repelled: How come I liked that? How come it didn't bother me? Well, it didn't bother you because you were seven and didn't know what was going on. You thought someone was showing you attention or love. We're looking at these experiences through the eyes of adults, not as a child.

Reason: It's just like any other memory.

Clancy: Exactly. And instead of just using this data to alert others to the fact that sexual abuse is often not understood by the victim, we as a society say: "Oh my God, you didn't think about it for ten years, it must be because it's so traumatic you repressed it." We have no culturally acceptable way of talking about sexual abuse that wasn't thought about. People think abuse must be so terrible that if you don't think about it, it must be because it was repressed. And that is because we fundamentally misunderstand or don't want to understand what actually happens. As a parent, I want people to know what happens.

Reason: You mention that alien abduction reports didn't start popping up until they became prevalent in pop culture in the 60s. Which is the most culturally resonant alien abduction account?

Clancy: Definitely Betty and Barney Hill. Nobody had said it before them, and their account was turned into a book, The Interrupted Journey by Don Fuller, and that book was turned into a major TV movie that was meretriciously presented as a "documentary." It was on NBC. That really became the seed story—everything blossomed from there. Steven Spielberg used the alien Barney Hill drew during hypnosis as a prototype for the alien that was in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And from there—I mean, who didn't see that movie?

Reason: What's your favorite alien abduction story?

Clancy: It's really so boring after you've heard one. For the most part they're all the same. I was in my bed and someone took me out of my bed and then I ended up on some kind of table (a black table usually) and then there are these creatures looking down at me and then they did so and so to me. The plot is always the same. The details differ—what the aliens look like, what exactly was done, what the purpose of the experiments were.