You are lying naked on a metal table, your legs strapped into restraints. You can see luminescent alien beings with big, froglike eyes as they move about in the darkness. They begin to cut into your body, and you are afraid they might cut out your heart. . . .

That description comes from a study of people who claim to be alien abductees, which was conducted at Harvard University and published in the journal Psychological Science this summer. The transcript was distilled from a recorded interview with an “abductee” and was then played back to him while researchers measured signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. Listening to his own story triggered physiological responses as pronounced as those seen in combat veterans. Similar physiological responses were measured in nine other abductees in the study.

The halls of Harvard, nestled amid the 19th-century clapboard houses and cobbled streets of Cambridge, seem an unlikely place to take extraterrestrials seriously. But the study is part of a six-year probe by Harvard psychologist Richard McNally and his colleagues into the minds of apparently sane people who believe they have memories of long-repressed events, including sexual abuse, alien abduction, and past lives. The study is an attempt to learn if humans can create memories unwittingly, memories so strong they may cause the debilitating symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.


 McNally thinks people can and do make up powerful memories. And these false memories can take on a life of their own, with profound legal, political, and social consequences. If juries find plaintiffs’ recovered memories credible, people go to jail. About a decade ago, a wave of cases involving recovered memories of sexual abuse tore families apart, led to lurid court trials, and spawned a branch of therapy devoted to recovered memories. Today another wave of trials are under way involving allegations of sexual abuse of children by priests. More than 500 cases of sexual abuse are pending in the Boston archdiocese alone. McNally says many of these cases involve “supposedly recovered memory.”

His research suggests that all memories—even false ones—are not just accessories of experience. Memory is experience, McNally says, a neurohormonal event that cascades through the brain and, when accompanied by powerful emotions, is burned into synapses. And he wonders how and why the human brain does this.

There are no definitive answers yet, but there are powerful clues. With the help of sophisticated neuroimaging techniques, researchers are finding that memory’s malleability is yoked to some of our most cherished aspects of intelligence: imagination, inference, and prediction. These are the same capacities that make us Earth’s dominant species. And because of this, it’s likely that memory’s vulnerability to error is here to stay.

At the turn of the last century, Freud invoked the concept of repression, a protective mental mode that smothers distressing emotional events. Scientists have been sparring over the nature of memory ever since, and in the last few decades the fight has become so acrimonious that psychologist Kathy Pezdek, of Claremont Graduate University in California, likens it to a religious war. Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist at the University of California at Irvine, whose studies of false memory have made her the target of a lawsuit and a separate investigation by her former university, says her “life has been derailed” by her research. McNally echoes her: “I’ve had to consult Harvard’s general counsel on three different occasions because of the saber rattling of trauma experts who didn’t like my work.” Susan Clancy, a psychologist who trained under McNally, says: “When I started this research, hate mail poured in by the ton. One colleague told me to get out of the area entirely since I’d be ruling myself out of job opportunities.”

Researchers are at war because there is no definitive evidence that life-shattering events can actually be buried for years, as Freud suggested, then winched out of the deep waters of the subconscious like a long-lost corpse. Yet people who claim to have done exactly that are tremendously convincing. Their sensory details are often striking and terrifying in their clarity. And these memories are intense enough to forever alter lives. “This experience [of abduction] really hits you in the pants,” says Will Beuche, an abductee who participated in McNally’s study. “All your assumptions about life are broken. It feels like everything you had based your character development on was wrong. You feel washed up on the shore with no personality at all.”

Such certainty is strong enough to convince another Harvard psychiatrist that the experiences, if not the abductions themselves, are real. John Mack, who heads the John E. Mack Institute a few minutes’ walk from McNally’s office, speaks of the “ontological shock” he went through when he first listened to the stories of abductees. Mack is the author of Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens and Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters. “That data operated like sulfuric acid on my worldview,” he says in a film documentary. “I couldn’t account for this in any way with anything I had learned.”