An abductee, Clancy suspects, is someone who is predisposed to believe.
• UFOs & Bogus Science
Bruce Grierson in the New York Times writes about false memory research and UFO zealots.
"Have you been contacted or abducted by space aliens?'' read the ad that ran in a number of Boston-area newspapers. ''You may be eligible to participate in a Harvard memory research study.'' ...
For two years, Clancy advertised in bookstores, visited Internet chat rooms and haunted U.F.O. conferences, handing out fliers for her memory study. At one point, in pursuit of appropriate subjects, she spent three days at a meeting of a group of supposed alien abductees at an old seaside Victorian inn in Newport, R.I. She sat in the hot tub with them as they cheerfully told her their stories -- an astonishingly consistent set of narratives involving bright light through bedroom windows, inexplicable time blackouts, encounters with bobble-headed small gray people with large black eyes and, often, invasive sexual medical experimentation. Among themselves, the experiencers talked business. There was a consensus about how stupid and misguided scientists were not to believe their accounts. ...
Finally, she scraped together 11 willing subjects, ran them and a control group through a battery of tests and collated the data, which demonstrated, in her view, that ''individuals who are more prone to develop false memories in the lab are also more likely to develop false memories of experiences that were only suggested or imagined.''