INTRODUCTION TO...
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UFO Contact and Abduction
The Differential Diagnosis of Close Extraterrestrial Encounter Syndrome
by Richard Boylan, Ph.D.
The evidence from my research and clinical experience, as well as that of other
clinical professionals working with experiencers of ET encounters, strongly suggests that
the vast majority of close encounter experiencers have an acute, mild-to-severe transient
reaction, if any, to their close extraterrestrial encounter. With prompt expert attention,
chronic symptoms are rare. These are experiencers who have had an Uncomplicated ET
Encounter. They exhibit the temporary symptoms, if any, of Close Extraterrestrial
Encounter Syndrome (CEES). A Brief Intervention Model of exploratory, educative and
ventilative counseling about close ET encounters generally suffices for the vast majority
of experiencers with an Uncomplicated Close Encounter. In these cases I have found that
one to six sessions of therapy and education generally are sufficient. After this brief
counseling is completed, the experiencers typically have worked through any anxiety they
might have ahd about their encounter(s). They are then ready to move on to an experience
consciousness-sharing group to explore further what ET contact means.
 Close Extraterrestrial Encounter Syndrome (CEES)
is an Adjustment Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (DSM 309.9): a reaction to a close
extraterrestrial encounter (CEE), remembered or repressed into the unconscious, which
substantially alters patterns of daily living or social relationships in a mildly
disorienting or unsettling way, and has four or more of the following 20 associated
symptoms. These
symptoms may include:
- Repeated
anxiety/unexplained restlessness after an anomalous event, (such as one
involving nocturnal lights, viewing a UFO, a sense of a foreign presence in the house, or
an unexplained detour from one's ordinary driving route);
- Phobic
reaction to phenomena consciously or unconsciously associated with a CEE, (such as an
accurate sketch of an extraterrestrial face);
- Repeated
sleep disturbances or nightmares with UFO/ET/Encounter themes;
- Obsessional
"Dreams" or daytime thinking about UFOs, ETs or CEEs;
- Compulsive
behavior (e.g., reading) concerning the UFO topic;
- Unexplained
moodiness/irritability after an anomalous UFO/encounter incident;
- Preoccupation
with body symptoms/marks associated with a CEE (such as tiny scoop marks, or laser
scars which don't bleed or hurt and which heal very quickly, or inexplicable bruises noted
upon wakening consistent with an extraterrestrial hand grip, or episodic ringing in one
ear, or other episodic resonance vibrations felt in a particular body site, such as the
upper nasal sinus cavity or the occipital lobe region of the brain);
- Experiencing an
unexplainable, substantial period of "missing time" following an anomalous
incident, (such as being paced at night by a "car" with a single powerful
headlight, or sitting down after dinner to watch television, immediately noticing an
unusual pattern on the screen, and "waking up" at 9:00 the next morning unable
to remember having watched TV or going to bed, etc.);
- The sudden,
unexplained onset of feelings of social non-ordinariness (i.e., that one is out of
sync with the world, or that the world no longer seems as it used to);
- Cosmic
awareness (thinking about the Earth as a living whole, instead of confining one's
perspective to neighborhood or town or country; or thinking about the Earth as just one
among many inhabited planets) which enters with unusual frequency into one's daytime
thinking;
- Suddenly
feeling an affinity for CEE experiencers one reads about or hears interviewed on
television, or feeling a strong attraction to extraterrestrials as somehow familiar;
- A sense of
receiving telepathic messages or repeated gifted intuitions, presumably from an
extraterrestrial source;
- A sense of
one's mindspace being episodically entered into and shared with an extraterrestrial
being;
- The onset
of or marked increase in, psychic/ESP ability, (such as clairvoyance, telepathy,
precognition, or telekinesis);
- Onset of attraction
for a spirituality or religious practice based on the in-dwelling of the Supreme Source in
all nature, and resultant reverence for all lifeforms as related;
- Sense of
longing for the primary-contact Extraterrestrial one has dealt with during one or more
Encounters;
- An
obsessive sense of having a mission (clear, vague or unconscious) derived from the
CEE, and related to the extraterrestrials’ messages;
- A sense of strong
"pull" to travel to a specific area, either with an intuition of an
impending close encounter there, or for an unknown reason, (which turns out to be a CEE);
- Having an
extraterrestrial perspective to the Earth's situation, or feeling a genetic heritage
partially derived from extraterrestrial sources, or having a sense of having come from
off-planet, or having somehow had an extraterrestrial as one parent;
- Sense of
one's destiny as off-planet, or feeling a "pull" to go "home" to
an extraterrestrial planet one was shown by the ET's, or to "rejoin fellow"
extraterrestrials elsewhere in the galaxy.
Then, there are those experiencers who are suffering from major
symptoms of a Complicated Close Extraterrestrial Encounter Syndrome (CEES). Most
often this is because they are still dealing with residual emotions from an earlier,
severe, human-caused trauma, for which they have not yet completed a successful course of
psychotherapy. In such instances, the extraterrestrial visitations cause an abreactive
exacerbation of previous, human-caused Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. Other preexisting
disorders which predispose an experiencer to develop major symptoms after an encounter
are: Dissociative Identity Disorder, Borderline Personality Syndrome, severe Histrionic or
severe Dependent Personality Disorder. For such dually-challenged persons the therapist
will need to consider longer-term psychotherapy.
Such therapy will need to deal with both the human-caused
traumatic issues and the emotional exacerbation and turmoil resulting from
extraterrestrial visitations. Special care will be needed to keep distinct the issues
stemming from the human-caused trauma, and those issues stemming from the extraterrestrial
contact itself. It cannot be expected that the experiencer who has had previous human
trauma will initially be able to keep the two events separate. In fact, in my research
experience, such experiencers almost always confuse the feelings coming from their
extraterrestrial encounter with the residual feelings from their human trauma.
And this is to be expected. The reason such confounding of close
encounter feelings with feelings from human trauma occurs is because the human trauma is
invariably extremely intense, catastrophically unexpected, out-of-the-norm, and extremely
intimate. The unresolved human traumata most likely to cause flashback emotions after a
close encounter are: childhood sexual molestation, childhood or adult rape, or childhood
ritual (Satanic) cultic abuse, (usually involving sexual molestation and torture.) Such
human traumata leave the victim with deep feelings of being intruded upon intimately by an
unwanted other person, feelings of being overpowered in a frightening way, feelings of
loss of the usual protective boundaries between what is personal and what is socially
shared, and feelings of loss of distinction between where self ends and where another
person begins (intimate invasion).
Because extraterrestrial encounters often involve the sudden
appearance of one or more extraterrestrials without warning in an unexpected location,
such as one's bedroom at night, their appearance can feel, at first, like an invasion. The
extraterrestrials’ use of mental telepathy, and their facility for reading one's
thoughts and the contents of one's mind, can feel, to the previously traumatized person,
like an old, familiar, and unwelcome intrusion into what is in our culture one's private
space. Here we have the clash of two cultures, polar opposite in their assumptions. In
human culture, (Western modern industrial culture, anyway,) the assumption is that one's
thoughts and living space are private, because individualism is prized. In
extraterrestrial cultures researched thus far, it appears that living space and thoughts
are inevitably shared, because of the automatic, two-way nature of the mutual telepathic
ability of all members of their society. They live in a shared mind-field
"commons".
There are other aspects of some close encounters which may also
cause traumatic flashbacks. Sometimes an extraterrestrial will cloak him/herself (yes,
they have gender) by imposing on the mind of the experiencer the borrowed appearance of a
familiar family figure, so that the experiencer believes (and remembers) that it was Dad,
or Uncle Henry, or Grandma that was actually in the bedroom the night they woke up with a
presence in the room. If that close encounter also includes a scientific-medical exam,
with the experiencer on her back, paralyzed or held in place by force-field ankle or wrist
restraints, and if palpation of the pelvic or buttocks areas, or a gynecological procedure
is part of the procedures, and the experiencer has only sketchy recall of the encounter,
their memory may put the fragments remembered together and come up with the pseudo-memory
that Dad, or Uncle Henry, or Grandma pinned them down in their bedroom and molested them.
I had discovered at least five instances of such pseudo-incest memories in an 86-case
research sample, and Harvard psychiatrist John Mack reports more.
Then, there are those minority of cases, perhaps 5%, of persons
who are the victims of pseudo-Alien abductions. These are staged by human
Military/Intelligence "Special Operations" personnel to extract information or
test exotic technology, and may include drugging, narco-hypnotism, psychological and
physical abuse, interrogations, threats, rape, or torture, in exotic unfamiliar settings,
with bizarre pseudo-"Aliens" (costumed Special Forces) present. The federal
Department of Health and Human Services has been collecting reports from these victims.
Differential diagnosis of CEES from schizophrenia is relatively
straightforward. Genuine experiencers do not have bizarre, grandiose, somatic, religious,
nihilistic or persecutory delusions, (although the clinician must distinguish such reports
as telepathic communication by ETs from schizophrenic thought-insertion delusions.)
Likewise, schizophrenic auditory hallucinations, where "the voices" criticize or
command, must be distinguished from audible-seeming ET telepathic communication. And
genuine experiencers are not incoherent, nor locked into illogical thinking or loose
associations, as schizophrenics so often are. Also, experiencers' affect is anything but
blunt or flat. Nor is their behavior grossly disorganized, as the schizophrenic's so often
is.
Borderline Personality Disorder, as well as Factitious Disorder
with Psychological Symptoms, provide differential diagnosis challenges, because many
attention-seeking Borderlines and Factitious Disordered are now hopping on the
"abductee-victim" bandwagon. Further, they have been exposed to enough media or
support-group data to cleverly mimic experiencers. But persons who have had genuine
encounters generally lack the marked mood-shifting, stubborn anger, history of intensely
unstable relationships, gnawing identity disturbance, impulsivity patterns and chronic
acting-out to enliven an empty life, which are the hallmarks of Borderlines.
Likewise, the Factitious-Disordered person's chaotic array of
symptoms and stubborn clinging to "victim" status do differentiate them from the
generally well-functioning experiencer, who genuinely wants to understand their
experiences and come to feel resolved.
The differentiation of Delusional Disorder, Paranoid Type from
CEES is more exacting, because a Delusional could, and sometimes does, have
a single-topic delusion of extraterrestrial visitation, and otherwise be functional.
However, the characteristically-disproportional, consuming paranoia of the Delusional is
quite different than the sometimes-afraid reaction of some experiencers. And Delusionals
are refractory to reality-based educative counseling, which experiencers are able to use
to master their misgivings and uncertainties about their encounter.
Frontal-Lobe Epilepsy may produce transient organic
hallucinations, which can infrequently include "seeing" extraterrestrials. But
the emotional lability, impulsiveness, intellectual rigidity or social disconnectedness
often also seen in these organic personality syndromes distinguishes them from genuine
experiencers, who are usually psychologically indistinguishable from the general
population.
In my view, there is no more interesting and rewarding work than
working with persons who have experienced a personal extraterrestrial visitation. The
opportunities for healing, learning, and growing are immense. Yet clinical skills will be
tested in this arena. And the need for vigilance to screen out the false and imitation
presentations will always be present. And traditional sources of professional and
colleague support are not yet evolved to encompass this reality. Until then, one finds new
supports, in organizations like ACCET and PEER and from other avant-garde clinicians and
experts.
One hundred years ago psychiatry was not an accepted discipline.
One hundred years from today, people will marvel that Psychology once excluded
extraterrestrial encounters as delusions.
Richard Boylan, Ph.D.
2826 0 Street, Suite 2
Sacramento, CA 95816, USA
(916) 455-0120
E-mail: rich.boylan@24stex.com
Primary website: www.ufonetwork.com/boylan/
Author: Close Extraterrestrial Encounters, Labored Journey To The Stars and
Project Epiphany.
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