A Reluctant Scholar Of Alienography
• UFOs & Bogus Science
Susan Clancy's research into the zany beliefs that many have about visitors from outer space. She's become the unwilling enemy of many a crackpot, self-serving obsessive, all those sad people who glory in their imaginary victimization both by extraterrestrials and sane folks.
She probably wouldn't put it this way but her studies have certified something that I've believed to be true since I was a lad. The average person's mind is a cornucopia of irrationality. It is as sturdy as a bowl of bran mush. Devoid of reason, living on the satisfactions of faulty perceptions, wayward epistemologies.
These people aren't 'weird' in any meaningful sense. Belief in nonsense is perfectly pedestrian. At best their nonsense is merely more colorful.
Her research has finally been summarized in Abducted: How People Come To Believe They Were Kidnapped By Aliens.
Those who believe aliens are among us haven't taken kindly to her theory that abductees have created "false memories" out of, she writes, a "blend of fantasy-proneness, memory distortion, culturally available scripts, sleep hallucinations, and scientific illiteracy."
That doesn't mean Clancy thinks her subjects are crazy. In fact, she was surprised how many of them seemed quite normal, intelligent and articulate.
"Arguing weird beliefs is a very normal thing," she said in a telephone interview from Nicaragua, where she has a research job. "It's very human for us to believe in things for which there is no scientific evidence."