Some studies have indicated that so-called "experiencers" — persons alleging face-to-face contact with extraterrestrials (ETs) or vehicles purportedly controlled by ETs — have a different psychological profile to non-experiencers.[1]
Research[edit]In a 1983 paper in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, a group of six persons who alleged contact with extraterrestrials were examined.[2] The study's authors determined that "five of them suffered from a paranoid delusional state often akin to paraphrenia".[2]
]Individual experiencers[edit]
A 2000 case study by a psychiatrist at Boston University Medical Center reported on the case of shared psychotic disorder by a married couple who both claimed to have been abducted by aliens. The husband had previously received mental health support following attempted suicide and the couple had a documented interest in UFOs. In the husband's case, this interest predated his earliest claimed abductions which first onset with his marriage. The wife, who believed she was an alien in a human body, claimed such encounters since before her marriage. The two patients' shared delusion fed each other's beliefs until it was "owned by them as a believable symbiotic creation". After the wife died, the husband persisted in his beliefs, possibly due to reinforcing messages he received from a group of six co-believers whom he had befriended. The psychiatrist noted that "the bond was strong enough for one of the six to visit him in a locked psychiatric unit".[5
A 2008 case, reported by physicians at the University of Louisville, involved an adult woman who reported difficulty sleeping due to her persistent belief that aliens kidnapped her at night. The patient's belief that she was being abducted began when she was approximately eight years old and read a book about alien abductions, and she later joined "a group of professed alien abductees". .."
