Are Aliens Having Sex With You While You Sleep?

Most of us are familiar with the concept of alien abductions.  If nothing else, we've seen the front pages of tabloids while checking out at the grocery store and read such lurid headlines as "Are Aliens Having Sex With You While You Sleep?" In general, those who claim to have been abducted by extra terrestrials are viewed as anything from attention seekers to lunatics.  When we think of this kind of person, we envision someone like Randy Quaid's character in Independence Day; a harmless quack who just isn't quite right in the head. Like the average American, I believed that alien abductees were anomalies in society; a small group of delusional paranoids who live on the fringes of society.

Recently, while researching for an article on the possibility of extra terrestrial life, my bias regarding alien abductions was shaken.  As I dug into the topic of alien abductions, I expected to uncover a couple of hundred accounts.  Imagine my surprise when I learned that there have been as many as four million cases of abductions in America alone. Four million Americans have been probed by aliens aboard a spacecraft? The thought boggles the mind!

That means that you have a one in 77 million chance of being abducted by aliens in the United States.  Just to put that statistic in perspective, consider the fact that you are twice as likely to be abducted by aliens as you are to win a lottery jackpot. In fact, you have a greater chance of being abducted by aliens than being killed by a shark. So while it may be safe to go back into the water, you'd better keep your eyes on the skies.

Reports of alien abductions hit the news in America in 1961 with the case of Barney and Betty Hill.  The Hills, through weeks of regression hypnosis, were able to reconstruct the details of their experience aboard an alien spaceship.  Since that time, reports of abductions have increased exponentially.  Over the last seven years, there has been an average of 10,000 reports each year of alien abductions.

Most scientists strongly refute allegations that aliens are abducting unsuspecting sleepers.  Psychologist point out that regressive hypnosis is just as likely to plant false memories as it is to bring out repressed memories.  Most recently, scholars have joined to point the finger at sleep paralysis as the most likely cause for the experiences described by those reporting alien abductions.

However, these theories fail to explain the abductions that take place while the subject is wide awake or those, like the case of Travis Walton, where there are multiple witnesses to the same event. After all, the overwhelming number of testimonies cannot be ignored. Something is going on while we sleep and, at least in my case, I'd sleep a lot better if I knew for sure what that something is.