Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. In late May, I spoke with Stephanie Kelly Romano, an associate professor of Rhetoric, Film and Screen Studies at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.
She has conducted research into alien abduction narratives, having collected stories from over three people who believe they have had abduction experiences and examining these accounts for common themes and what they can tell us about issues of control, rights, reality, identity, and power in our society. I'm Toby Ball, and this is Strange Arrivals. I am Stephanie Kelly Romano. I'm an associate professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies at Bates College.
And for my dissertation research, I interviewed people who thought they had been obducted by aliens. So what what kind of caused you to be interested in that particular subject. Yeah, that's a question I get a lot. I became interested in this because, truthfully, when I was in graduate school, I was watching The X Files and I really liked the X Files. And when you're in graduate school, you don't have a lot of extra time to do things
that you like, unless it's part of your research. Additionally, I didn't necessarily want to just look at speeches of like dead presidents, and so I started looking at the X Files and conspiracy rhetoric, and of course there's the whole theme about the abduction and Molder sister, and so then I got interested in people who think they've been abducted or claim experiences with extraterrestrials, and how do they carve out space for themselves and legitimacy, right, Like, how
does that happen? I found when I was doing this that there seems like there might be kind of a feedback loop in between the X files and and the population at large. Did do you have that perception that you know, the X files obviously uses, you know, the stuff that that Bud Hopkins at all have done to kind of create this narrative, but then all these people who get to see it, and it seems like the uh,
the instances of supposed abduction somebody to have an uptick. Um. Yeah, I don't know if there's any type of uh correlation in terms of the uptick and things like that. I do know that, like, even I think it was Martin Codomier did an article about Barney Hill and that episode of the Outer Limits the Balero Shield and whether or not there was a correlation or association there. So, like the imprinting of cultural texts and the chicken or the
egg argument, you know, like which came first? I don't know, um, but I do know that with the X Files, what's really interesting, or the piece that I really look at, is so in pop culture, we have certain characterizations of extraterrestrial experiences and experiencers, right, and we have them not only in the X Files but all kinds. People of Earth was a recent sitcom about an alien abduction support
group that drew on those same tropes of abduction. What I find interesting is that people who claim experiences with extraterrestrials don't always have those same themes and tropes. But people who are interested in the phenomenon but don't have the experiences do so general pop culture. Like my students when they come to my class and I say, what do you know about alien abduction? They tell me all the things that have been on the X Files or
in Steven Spielberg movies or whatever. But people who have had actual encounters have a tendency to be a little bit more distanced from that. Why don't you tell me about the study that I guess form the basis for your dissertation, and then um, several papers that I've read, right, So, So, like I said, when I started this, I just I wanted to study something in graduate school that I found interesting.
When you're getting work, when you're getting ready to do doctoral work and to write a dissertation, you're going to be studying it for years, literally, like this is going to be the beginning of my career, and so I thought this would be an interesting thing that would keep my attention. I had no idea, I had no idea how big it was. Um, I came to it very underinformed. And so when I first started this, the questions that I asked people who thought they had had these experiences
were very simple. They're they're open ended narrative questions because I am a rhetorical scholar, so I studied myth. I studied narrative and study the way that people use language to make sense of their lives and who they are right their actual identity. So the questions were really open ended because I just wanted people to talk about their experiences.
And then I also went to some conferences. I went most notably to the Leo Sprinkles conference out in Wyoming because I did my graduate work in Kansas, so it was close by. I also solicited people on the internet I had. I was on various message boards. I got in touch with several different researchers and also UM therapists who work with populations of experiencers, and they would hand
out the survey anonymously. The survey was anonymous UM, and they would hand it out and then I would collect them. So after I first I got my first way back, I realized how many questions I also needed to ask right in addition, and several people were super good, I mean amazing, amazing people in terms of answering my follow up questions as I kind of learned what it was I needed to know in order to answer my research questions. So there were several people who would answer each time
I would send out another query UM. And then the instrument grew little by little until I had a pretty decent instrument to capture kind of the experience and how people attributed it and what people thought of different aspects of it. UM and then once I had all that. I mean I have I have hundreds. I have over three hundred people now who claim experience is And as you probably know, most people who have an experience have
more than one. Most people that I've spoken with or communicated with have been have had experiences since the time they were a young child, over the course of their lives for many years. So each experiencer might have two three experiences that we have talked about or they've described to me of where of where corresponded about. Um So I have a humongous repository of information and then I just look at it with different questions over the years.
I've been doing this now for twenty five years, and so when different things happen oftentimes in the world, I'll say, you know, how does this relate? How does this go on?
And so for example, right now, UM, I just recently did a program about coronavirus conspiracies, and on it we were kind of talking about how science can be used in order to prove non scientific or pseudos scientific things like how do methods of research and gathering information gain legitimacy, And it immediately made me think about alien abduction discourse, and uh, David Jacobs and John mac and the various things that they say in order to kind of co
opt the discourse of scientific legitimacy while at the same time critiquing it. Right. So it's it's this tension that goes on and so um. Over the years, I've just kind of looked at race or gender or implants or truth or whatever is interesting to me when you're getting things back from people. How much does the believability of the experience the reality of the experience, How important is that or is that just not important at all? You know?
Truth is probably one of the biggest questions that I grapple with that constantly, is underneath whatever questions we are asking of extraterrestrial existence, experience, interaction, right um. And I really like the distinction between something being true and something being real. Right. So, I do not know the truth of an experience, whether or not it empirically happened in this reality in another reality. I have no idea. I do not know, and that's not my area. I don't
have the means by which to evaluate that. I do know that the criteria that I use is whether or not these people believe these experiences to be real. If they are real for them in the sense that they have consequence in their life, then I care about it, right. So it's very much similar to any type of faithful discourse. I I don't necessarily know if God is true, but for me personally, God is real, right, So so that
distinction is one that I make. It's very hard for me and I try very much to avoid making any type of evaluations about which experiences are true, because this is a phenomenon that we don't know things about UM and David Jacobs talks about it in the beginning of UM I think It's Secret Life, where he talks about the fact that now he can kind of intuitively sense which accounts are true and are in line with other
abduction narratives. But my problem is that as a culture, as a society, as people, we naturally fill in our stories so that they move toward other people. There's this reciprocal thing that happens because we're building relationships, and so that UM, that tendency to adhere is something that I always think about in terms of truth, is it true or is it not? And so I just deal with what's real and if it's real. For the people who
claim to have experience, then I include them. I also do do some kind of cross checking of narrative elements and consistency, right, make sure that the stories that they're telling me have coherence and fidelity insofar as they can
remain consistent over time. Um. But of course, what that does is that then eliminates anyone who does not want to be contacted again, who wants to remain entirely anonymous, or those people who don't contact me, right, And those, of course are the people I want to talk to, people who have had experiences who don't tell anyone. Um. But it's it's hard because we only get I only get people who are willing to come forward with their experience.
What's um, so, so who's getting abducted? M hmm. Well, most of the work that I did was in the early two thousands, um and UM. At that point, you know, Thomas Bullard Eddie Bullard had done that huge store, that huge study about abduction accounts. Christopher Bader has also done a lot of work in terms of religious studies, as as Christopher Partridge. And then I also did a piece for the general UFO studies, and and my sample of experiencers was very similar to what other people's reports were
kind of reflecting. And so while in the past it had seemed as though more women were being abducted, the kind of balance between men and women even out it seems as though it's just about equal now. My sample seemed to be made up of people who have a higher than average education or at least attend more school than average kind of census data. But of course I'm collecting my data at abduction conferences and via the internet, both of which require disposable income, leisure time, and and
a class privilege that also is correlated with educational attainment. Right, So, um, I think that, Um, I think that the people and totally I can tell you that the people that I talked to about their experiences were not the people that I anticipated. They were just regular people, and they had regular lives and regular jobs and regular families, and they just thought that they had been abducted by aliens or
had these encounters. And and there was also when I was when I was reading your paper about this, there was sort of racial disparity compared to the population at large. Yes, absolutely alien abduction, at least those abjectives who are willing to or experiencers who are willing to come forward are overwhelmingly Caucasian. Um. But again, and and it does seem to be And there have been several articles that have been written about like, you know, why, you know, why
the aliens only abduct white folks? And I think it's a valid question. Um, But you know, culturally, I think there are several explanations for that in terms of the way abduction stories can be used to kind of explore racialized discourse or kind of race more broadly. Do you have an example? Yeah, so the ones I'm thinking of are all related. Oh I know, yes, Okay, I was thinking.
I think a lot about gender because a lot of the stuff that I've been doing lately is more feminist stuff, and so I have all kinds of gender examples at
the ready. In terms of um, you know, David Jacobs writes about these extra gestational units that are implanted into men so that they can then incubate and kind of bring these alien human hybrid fetuses to life literally, and so kind of I interpret that as somewhat this co optation of birthing narratives and pregnancy narratives by men, right, because that's historically a story that they've left entirely out of that they're not allowed to experience and that they
can't have, but through these extra gestational units they can. In terms of an example for race, I think that just the fact that experiencers talk about a multiplicity of types of aliens and that the aliens have different characteristics. So, for example, the little gray aliens that are so popular in pop culture are oftentimes those beings that are um kind of worker beings. They don't necessarily have personality, they're
not particularly developed or advanced in a lot of ways. Technologically, certainly they are, but they're very focused on conducting experiments or um or doing that kind of thing. Whereas people also talk about Nordic aliens, and Nordic aliens have a tendency to be more human looking and they are, you know, characteristically Caucasian and blonde. Um, and those aliens are the ones that are compassionate. Those aliens are the ones that
are kind. So there have been a bunch of different studies or a couple articles anyway, that talk about gray aliens as being kind of the combination of black and white, right, and so this ambiguous racialized mixture, But also the fact that the advanced aliens are Caucasian, I mean, coupled with ancient alien theories, which are inherently racist in some ways. Um,
you know, race is clearly underneath it all. The fact that any um, non westernized, non on colonized society couldn't have made whatever it is, the Pyramids and ask a lines whatever, um, and they needed to have help from extraterrestrials, but westernized Caucasian societies didn't is a little questionable. Okay, So sort of change in direction a little bit. Can
you explain the concept of a living myth? Sure? Um, so myth unlike kind of the pejorative negative connotation, right that people have Oftentimes when people say when I say I study myth, people who have had experiences get initially really defensive. They're like, you're not going to tell me this isn't real. You're not going to tell me this is fake and made up. Because when we think about myth,
we think about fake stories. But when we talk about myth academically, right intellectually, when we're talking about myth, we're talking about those stories that orient us towards the world, those large framing stories that help us make sense of our personal identities of our communities and literally of the universe. Right, So, living myths can be or myths, It can be anything. Religions, for example, our myths. And that's not to to be
disrespectful to religion. What it means to say is that religions are orienting stories that tell people what their purposes, what the universe is about, how the universe got here, how society should be. They give us all of these kind of ways to behave They tell us what we should do and should not. Um So, so religions are like living myths, And in my work I argue are
are like myths. Excuse me, And in my work I argue that living myths are those stories that can bubble up in communities or in societies that help do the work that orienting work of myth, but aren't codified and written down and aging in a way that makes them irrelevant. Right.
One one could argue that the Catholic Church, for example, has not kept up with scientific knowledge, it has not kept up with feminist positions, it has not kept up with kind of cultural social justice issues, and so for many the framework of of Catholic myths or Christian myths might not resonate anymore, right, they might not feel as
though they can be a part of that. And I think that people seek out most people seek out those spaces of belonging and those explanatory ideologies and world views that comfort us and inform us. And so I don't think it's a bad thing. I always feel like defensive when I have to talk about myth UM. I don't think it's a bad thing. I think it's just an amazing faculty of humans that we use narrative to make sense of our lives. And these are the stories that
we tell. Strange arrivals will return in a moment. And then so you took a look at these um, these narratives and kind of identify some emergent stories right of you know, thematically similar stories. Mm hmm, yeah I did. There are several different themes, and themes have changed over
the years. Right in my initial dissertation, I wrote about themes of physical salvation, where the extraterrestrials were here to kind of rescue us, whether that was actual physical rescuing like taking people off the planet via ships or collecting our DNA to be able to um remake or you know, keep alive humanity in the future. So those were narratives
of physical salvation. There were narratives of hybridization, which are the stories that we hear about a lot in both the abduction community, the UFO community, and also in pop culture. And those are the stories about the alien human hybrid kind of program, this UM drive to make a master race. And and within narratives of UH narratives of hybridization, we have this tension between both those stories where the extraterrestrials are it's kind of the John mac story of they
are spiritually advanced. They're here to help us, They're here to help us evolve, They're here to help us have that ontological shock that will allow us to be integrated into the galactic community UM, versus the stories that are told by people like David Jacobs, where the aliens are not at all good. They are very manipulative, they're very deceitful UH, and they are not here for anything other than their own personal use of the human as a
resource right to to carry out this program. So hybridization has this tension between the two that I find totally fascinating. So UM. The third narrative type was betterment of humanity, and in those narratives, the extraterrestrials were coming in order to help humans evolve themselves. But it's a very in those So in those stories, people would be compelled to advance spiritually, engage in meditation, they would be compelled to change jobs and do things that were more service oriented
like e. M. T. S or doctors. And what's really interesting or what distinguishes the betterment of humanity narratives from the cosmic community narratives is the fact that embedterment of humanity, the individual is the focus. So it's not about humanity,
it's not about UM the universe. It's about the individual's personal journey of betterment um that and it's intimated that that is for the betterment of humanity certainly, But in terms of making distinctions, it was the fact that it was still focused on the individual, whereas the later narrative category, cosmic community, is much more about the collective whole and the collective move towards UM, you know, integration. And then the four thematic thing that I found in my dissertation
research was these narratives of cosmic community. And in the narratives of cosmic community, it's really this more full articulation of almost a religious discourse of this idea that the aliens. Oftentimes it's the aliens are us and we are them. The DNA is all shared, but it's not necessarily turned on. Also in this category are narratives that talk about kind of the inter dimensional or intergalactic nature of these entities UM and whether or not they are us from the
future and uh and and other things like that. So what I found and the reason why I did that thematic analysis was I found that depending on the motive that people believed right the individual experiencer, depending on what they believed why the aliens were here, the narrative qualities of their store ease were similar. So, for example, in stories of um cosmic community, oftentimes people didn't talk about abduction, which I found fascinating um. Instead, they would talk about
the significance of the experience. They would talk about the consequences of the experience. And so I argue that those stories have kind of been internalized more and are much more a part of the person's identity, whereas stories of like physical salvation and evacuation, when the aliens are going to come in a ship and take us away, or take our d n A. Those stories are very granular in their detail. The textual detail is tiny. So they talk about the the the appearance of the beings and
of the ships. They can talk about the smells. Oftentimes people report smelling sulfur. They talk about the attitudes of the beings, they talk about telepathic communication and in play. They're talk in great detail about what goes on during the experience, particularly um the capture portion of the experience, where they're paralyzed in bed or compelled to drive to
a remote location, whatever it may be. But those stories are very much specific in their in their details, and people are much more likely to use qualifiers and to say things like I know this might sound crazy, or I don't know what I think about this, or I'm not sure, or this may have been a dream right.
There are a lot more qualifiers in those other narratives as well, and so with the four of them, I argue that they're kind of like Russian nesting dolls in terms of the process of belief, and so as someone comes to believe something, as someone interprets their experiences right there having these anomalous experiences that they don't know what
to do, with and then suddenly extraterrestrials make sense. It resonates as true for them, and so of course at first they're going to say, I'm not sure about this. I don't know. But then as they come into their belief, as they get more affirming UM and and confirming evidence, then they get more and more developed in exactly the significance of that experience. So is your sense that these different themes UH can like sort of happily coexist, you know? I I do think that they can. They can well
happily coexist. I don't know about happily coexist. I think that whenever UM reality is being created, which reality is always being created through language, like that's how we get things that are real, you know. UM. But whatever that is happening, there are inconsistent and other narratives that contradict
the status quo or the party line. Right, So we have, for example, a history of race in the United States that until recently ignored the you know, colonization and murder of indigenous people, and ignored the degree to which UM capitalist society was based in slavery. So, but now we're getting those kind of corrective narratives. So I think that with any with any truth, with any reality, we have
this kind of competitive narrative thing that goes on. So I find it really interesting the tension between people who claim that the extraterrestrials are here to help us and people that claim the extraterrestrials are here to hurt us because they don't have room for each other, right, because it can't be both um. Although some people do say that there are certain ones that are here to help us and certain ones that are here to hurt us.
But for the most part, these tensions of motive I think really speak to kind of the tensions in our culture and tensions in our society. Interesting. Um, so you use you use Jacobs and you use mac what Um Was there a reason why you didn't use Bud Hopkins. I did do um well for my dissertation. I did primarily I used the narratives that I had collected. Right subsequently,
I've looked at and Hopkins. I think certainly I've read his work, and he's part of the trajectory of authority and trajectory of narrative, and that's tense to just in terms of the release of his book Versus Whitley, Strieber's book, and the timing of all of that, and and the privilege ching of particular narrative types. So I think that for me, Mac and Jacobs are the primary kind of touchstones because of their credentials quite truthfully, right m d
pH d um. Those credentials are oftentimes highlighted in their work. At the top of every page of I Think It's Secret Life, it says David Jacobs PhD. You know, on the cover of Abduction. For John Mack it says John Mac m d um. And so I think that the the pushing of the credentials along with the narrative makes it digestible to general society. Not necessarily experienced there's, but
general society in a different way. One of the things that I find really interesting about abduction discourse and alien experiences is the focus on reproduction. And there is uh a book by a woman named Brown, I think, who writes about the kind of correspondence between reproductive rights politics and abduction accounts. Timing. So, for example, Betty and Barney Hill happens right as kind of Row v. Wade in
vitro fertilization. All of these kind of things are swirling around reproductive politics, and suddenly, not suddenly, but simultaneously we have aliens who are focused on reproduction and on making
this kind of hybrid race. And I think that when I talk about FUCO and biopower, what biopower does is biopower really gives us away to think about, to take a step back from the actual narrative or from the story and try to understand who gets power from this or how is this working for the individual or for society. And so with with notions of biopower, what we have is we have two poles, and on the one pole we have the individual, and on the other pole we
have society. And for CO argues that there are mechanisms that can strain and kind of limit both the individual and society, and um alien abduction discourse kind of really demonstrates that in the sense that it's highly focused on the individual and the individual's reproduction and what the individual
gives and what the individual can do. And so you can talk about that, right, so the individual can talk about the fact that they have just stated several of these pregnancies, they have had these pregnancies taken, and then they can have ownership over all of that trauma, right, because the rhetoric trauma is huge, and so then those
feelings are then given an outlet. Similarly, when we think about kind of the whole body politic, we also have kind of rules that are being made around the future of the species, so to speak, in the sense that the aliens are targeting particular types of people or types
of characteristics that are deemed desirable. So most notably oftentimes, when people claim that they've been they've had these experiences, when I ask them why they're chosen, oftentimes people will say that they're chosen because they have the ability to be more intuitive, to be more spiritual, to rely less on the rational world, to distance themselves from capitalist consumer society,
whatever the case may be. And so what we really see and there is a critique of enlightened rationalism and this idea of that spirituality, intuition, individual experience are all valid, right, They're all important ways of knowing, and that the scientific method should not be the only privileged way of knowing. And that particular tension is most clearly shown when people will say to me, I don't care that you know, people try to refute it, I know what happened to
me right, So the primacy of that experience interesting. Is there anything that I haven't asked you about that you think is important for people to understand? What I'm thinking about is I'm thinking about the fact that I do believe that the people with whom I corresponded and interviewed and everything else, I do believe that these people believe what has happened to them, right, And I believe that
they believe that it's true. Um, And so I guess us, what I hope is that researchers, both the researchers of all types, are able to kind of help people find ways to talk about these stories and talk about the larger cultural reflections. Kenneth Burke rights that language selects reflex and deflex reality, and I absolutely believe that is true, right. So, so abduction discourse to some degree selects particular aspects of
reality and magnifies it basically for us to see. And so the focus on reproduction, the focus or the the exclusion of racial diversity, all of these things I think are indicative of kind of our current political cultural times. Next week, on the final bonus episode of this season of Strange Arrivals, I talked with documentary filmmaker Carol Rainey
Bud Hopkins ex wife and former research partner. She talked to me about her experience in the midst of the abduction heyday of the nine nineties and early two thousand's. Bud and Dave regarded their findings as they interpreted them, showing that if the aliens were here to harm us, and we didn't know maybe they were, but they certainly were here to do us any good, that they used
us basically as research subjects. They had no compunction about coming into our bedrooms at night, or dipping into our cars or wherever we happened to be and vacuum us up and either experiment with eggs s firm. You know, none of this makes sense scientifically over decades and decades. Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Grimm and Mild from Aaron Mankey. This episode was written and hosted by Toby Boll and produced by Miranda Hawkins and Josh Thane, with executive producers Alex Williams, Matt Frederick, and Aaron Manky. Betty Hill was portrayed by Gina Rickikey. Barney Hill was portrayed by Jason Williams Special thanks to the MILNS Special Collections and Archives at the University of New Hampshire, John Horrigan, w y Am in Norwich, Connecticut, John White, and David O'Leary, the executive producer of the
History Channel's dramatic series Project Bluebook. Learn more about the show over at GRIMM and mil dot com. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite else