Topic
Encounter and abduction accounts, and the researchers who studied them. 88 events, newest first.
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Open Close encounters as a timeline
Close encounters23 Aug 2022
Three researchers at the Main Astronomical Observatory of Ukraine's National Academy of Sciences posted a preprint describing daytime-sky video of fast bright and dark objects. They estimated sizes of 3 to 12 meters and very high speeds; the paper was not peer reviewed when posted.
Photo: Alexey laa, CC BY 4.0
Close encounters26 Jul 2021
Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb announced the Galileo Project, a privately funded effort to search systematically for evidence of extraterrestrial technological objects, including UAP and interstellar visitors, using purpose-built instruments and publishing data openly.
Photo: Christopher Michel, CC BY-SA 4.0
Close encountersJul 2011
New Hampshire put up a state historical marker on Route 3 in Lincoln titled 'Betty and Barney Hill Incident', calling it the first widely reported UFO abduction report in the U.S. A resident petitioned for it; the state said it marked the story's cultural impact, not its truth.
Close encountersSep 2009
As Yukio Hatoyama prepared to become Japan's prime minister, wide press coverage noted that his wife Miyuki had written in a 2008 book that her soul rode a triangular UFO to Venus while she slept. She said a former husband had called it a dream.
Photo: Lawrence Jackson, White House photographer, Public domain
Close encountersNov 2008
Chris French's team at Goldsmiths compared 19 UK alien contact experiencers with matched controls. Experiencers scored higher on dissociation, absorption, fantasy proneness, tendency to hallucinate and reported sleep paralysis, but showed no difference in false-memory susceptibility.
Photo: Alex Blandford, CC BY 2.0
Close encounters2007
Nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman and Kathleen Marden, Betty Hill's niece, published 'Captured!' with New Page Books. It retells the 1961 Hill abduction claim, drawing on the Hills' papers, letters and audiotapes, which Marden held as conservator, and compares their hypnosis sessions.
Photo: SMG2019, CC BY-SA 4.0
Close encountersJan 2007
Chris Bledsoe of Hope Mills, North Carolina, says that on a fishing trip on the Cape Fear River he saw glowing orbs and lost several hours. He later self-published a book about this and later experiences; his account has not been independently verified.
Close encounters2005
Harvard psychologist Susan Clancy published Abducted with Harvard University Press, based on her interviews with people who believed aliens had taken them. She argued that sleep paralysis, cultural ideas and memories shaped under hypnosis can explain how such beliefs form.
Close encounters27 Sep 2004
Harvard Medical School psychiatrist John E. Mack, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer best known for studying people who reported alien encounters, was struck and killed by a vehicle in London at age 74 while walking home from a T.E. Lawrence symposium.
Photo: Becket01, CC BY-SA 4.0
Close encounters2004
Harvard psychologists Richard McNally and Susan Clancy reported in Psychological Science that people who believed they were abducted reacted physiologically to their abduction memories much like trauma patients. They argued that strong belief, not real events, can drive such reactions.
Close encountersAug 2002
Harvard psychologists Susan Clancy, Richard McNally and colleagues reported that people with recovered or suspected memories of alien abduction made more false recall and recognition errors in a word-list test than controls, with no difference in correct recall.
Photo: Donna McNally, CC BY-SA 4.0
Close encounters2000
The American Psychological Association's 'Varieties of Anomalous Experience', edited by Etzel Cardena, Steven Jay Lynn and Stanley Krippner, included a chapter by Stuart Appelle, Lynn and Leonard Newman reviewing abduction reports: prevalence, aftereffects, psychopathology and proposed explanations.
Photo: Harrison Keely, CC BY 4.0
Close encountersNov 1999
Psychiatrist John Mack's book, first published by Crown, drew on a decade of interviews with experiencers and argued their encounters were about spiritual change and ecological warning more than physical aliens. It reports experiencers' claims, not verified events.
Photo: Becket01, CC BY-SA 4.0
Close encountersSep 1999
University of Waterloo psychologists J. Allan Cheyne, Steve Rueffer and Ian Newby-Clark published research on hallucinations during sleep paralysis. They described an 'Intruder' pattern of sensed presence, fear and visions, which researchers have weighed as one source of night-visitor accounts.
Photo: JFVoll, CC BY-SA 4.0
Close encounters1998
Temple University historian David M. Jacobs published The Threat with Simon and Schuster, arguing from hypnosis sessions with abductees that aliens were running a breeding program to produce human-alien hybrids. Kirkus Reviews received the claims skeptically.
Photo: Hinata47d, CC BY-SA 4.0
Close encounters1998
Cornell University Press published political scientist Jodi Dean's study of UFO and abduction culture, which treated aliens as cultural icons of distrust and conspiracy in late-1990s America. The New York Review of Books gave it a sharply critical cover review.
Photo: Institute of Network Cultures from the Netherlands, CC BY-SA 2.0
Close encounters29 Sep 1997
Nine physical scientists in a review directed by Stanford's Peter Sturrock heard eight UFO investigators present their strongest physical-evidence cases at a 1997 workshop. Their 1998 report found no proof of unknown physics or alien origin but said some cases deserve careful study.
Close encountersApr 1996
Psychologists Leonard Newman and Roy Baumeister published a target article in Psychological Inquiry proposing that abduction memories are largely spurious, elaborated under hypnosis, with masochism-like themes reflecting a wish to escape the self. Several researchers published replies.
Photo: ZURICH.MINDS, CC BY-SA 3.0
Close encounters27 Feb 1996
The PBS science series NOVA examined alien abduction accounts, giving time to Budd Hopkins, John Mack and abductees, then weighing them against sleep paralysis, suggestibility and false-memory research presented by Carl Sagan, Elizabeth Loftus and other skeptics.
Photo: PBS, Public domain
Close encountersAug 1995
After a year-long faculty review of psychiatrist John Mack's work with people reporting alien abductions, Harvard Medical School chose not to censure him. Its dean affirmed Mack's academic freedom but warned him to keep to the faculty's research standards.
Photo: Becket01, CC BY-SA 4.0
