The Meme Machine

CHAPTER 14
Memes of the new age
One day in 1997, a young student came to interview me for his media project.
After several predictable questions he said ‘Dr Blackmore, you are well known
for your theory that alien abductions are really a form of sleep paralysis. Well I
have experienced sleep paralysis and I have been abducted by aliens, and I can
tell you they are not the same thing at all.’
It was my turn to ask the questions. Over many hours he told me of multiple
abductions, starting when he was five years old and continuing into his
adulthood. He told of aliens landing in the fields outside his house, of their
visits to his bedroom and of operations they performed on him inside their
spaceship. To top it all he showed me a tiny metallic object that the alien
creatures had implanted in the roof of his mouth and which he had removed after
two weeks of discomfort. Would I, with my ‘closed mind’ on UFOS, be
prepared to analyse it scientifically?
Naturally I said yes. My own sceptical view of abductions was open to test
by just this kind of object. There have been thousands of claims that people
have been abducted, and several well-known academics prepared to support
them (Jacobs 1993; Mack 1994). The stories are fairly consistent, and the
people who tell them are known to be of at least average intelligence and
education, and generally psychologically healthy (Spanos et al. 1993). But
absolutely no convincing physical evidence has ever been provided, unless you
count some stained clothing and a few previous ‘implants’. But you never
know, this one might be it – every scientist’s dream – an object of unimaginable
consequence – a piece of technology from an alien civilisation. Of course I
wanted to analyse it.
The analysis was simple and so was the answer, The mysterious object,
though it looked very much like other ‘implants’ under the electron microscope,
turned out to be made of dental amalgam. The young man was partly
disappointed and partly relieved, but as far as I know he is still convinced that he
has been abducted, even though he is not now so frightened of the creatures
implanting more objects in his body.
So what is going on? Accusing these people of either making up their
incredible stories, or suffering delusions, is unfair when many of them (and I
have met many) appear perfectly ordinary, sane people. They have clearly been