Encounters With the Third Kind: The Memory Twilight Zone
Zoe Curran
Illustrations by: Naomi Tomlin
Something In The Sky
Your car careens around sharp turns as you make your way home on a dark, forested highway. You drive through unfamiliar territory tonight, far from streetlights and neighbors. Even the trees look different out here. You’re passing a road sign when you first hear it: a high-pitched whine infiltrating the car through the cracked windows. The whine ascends to a scream. You notice a spotlight piercing through the darkness, cutting across the treetops, shining through your windshield. In a moment of panic, you crash into the highway barrier. Suddenly, the spotlight is on you. You finally see the source of the sound and light: a wide, chrome saucer hovering 50 feet above you, beaming you up! A door begins to open, tall grey figures illuminated within. You wake up the next morning in your own bed. Outside your window, your car is intact. And yet, your body is covered in scratches and you can’t shake the image of the saucer and the tall grey figures. Who took you that night, and where did you go?
The Origin of the Extraterrestrial
When reading the story above, could you see the bright saucer lights and hear the crunching car metal as you collided with the highway barrier? What features can render a false memory easy to believe? To begin untangling the neural complexity of false memory formation, we must first understand how memory salience can change how, and what, we remember. Salience is defined as being particularly noticeable or prominent; therefore, a salient memory is one that readily comes to mind out of a sea of surrounding memories.
Cultural relevance plays a key role in the salience of a memory. For example, iterations of the alien abduction narrative have invaded popular culture since the early 1960s. The true origin of this narrative actually belongs to the Puritan fisherman James Everell [1, 2]. As documented by John Winthrop, governor of the mid-1600s Massachusetts Bay Colony, Everell claimed he saw a mysterious light that “ran as swift as an arrow” darting across the marshland of “Muddy River.” Future fishermen described seeing the same unexplained light appearing on the marsh. Some heard voices or commands. Everell even claimed that the light had carried his boat a mile upstream [2]. Flashing lights, strange beings, and lost time – sound familiar?
The details of the Puritans' experiences echo elements of another Encounter with the Third kind: Betty and Barney Hill’s 1961 tale of an extraterrestrial encounter deep in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Their story begins with Betty and Barney in the final stretch of their late- night drive home; a sleepy Barney was behind the wheel when he first saw the lights of a strange object flying overhead, following the movement of their car and growing brighter with each passing mile [1]. The extraterrestrial powers of their abductors rendered the couple paralyzed and unconscious. When they awoke two hours later, they realized that they had traveled 35 miles down the road.
Before the story’s publication, the Hills lived a quiet suburban life, untouched by extraterrestrials or media frenzy. However, their story forever changed how alien abduction accounts were both told and understood. In the years after their alleged encounter, the couple developed severe psychosomatic symptoms: crippling anxiety, disturbing dreams, and even stomach ulcers. Plagued by their physical and mental ailments, the couple sought out a hypnotherapist to determine if there was a relationship between that fateful encounter and the onset of their suffering. It took weeks of hypnosis for the ulcers to heal and the anxiety to diminish, and as their mental health began to recover, the Hills felt compelled to tell their curious tale [1].
Three key characteristics of this encounter are worth examining. First, prior to the Hills’ experience, extraterrestrial encounters were painted as friendly, albeit strange. The fact that the Hills were attacked challenged this notion, explaining why their narrative made for such great storytelling. Second, the Hills provided an incredible amount of detail when presenting their encounter. The couple could remember how many miles away from a rest stop they had traveled, the structure of the tailing UFO, and the color of the lights on the spacecraft. Lastly, the recollections only emerged after the couple had been placed in a hypnotic trance and asked a series of leading questions by their psychiatrist. In this hypnosis-induced state of heightened susceptibility, the Hills could have been led to believe that anything had happened to them. In a sense, their own memories were up for grabs, ripe for manipulation. In addition to sparking an American fascination with saucers in the night sky, Betty and Barney revealed a crucial paradox of memory: humans often believe irrational things for rational reasons. For example, encoding a salient memory after being attacked by a terrifying figure is rational, but improperly encoding the figure as an alien is irrational. Moreover, being “rational” does not exempt someone from forming false memories. False memory formation can occur in all of us.
How a Falsity Becomes a Truth: The Formation of False Memories
The human brain can form memories fairly easily, even ones involving aliens. But how, exactly, do these memories form? Think of an equation you are trying to memorize for a class. You begin by looking at your notes, taking in the details, the length, the meaning of each variable, and its application. Your notes and the elements of the equation serve as sensory input: the initial stage of memory formation. This information is then stored in a temporary memory bank. While the equation waits patiently in this bank, you repeat the information by rewriting the equation over and over. This process is called rehearsal. As you rehearse the equation, it leaves the sensory memory bank and travels to a new storage location: your short-term memory. From here, the information will be encoded and remembered for the long haul and is said to be a component of your long-term memory, divided into two subsets: explicit and implicit memory. Learning a math equation is a form of explicit memory, requiring conscious effort to recall. Remembering your mother’s name is an example of implicit memory, or something that is recalled effortlessly.
Many tend to incorrectly assume that these memory processes all occur in one location: the famed hippocampus. Although peripherally involved in a number of memory processes, the hippocampus is primarily involved in the storage of episodic memory, or autobiographical accounts of specific life events [3]. The formation of long-term memories, however, requires the simultaneous engagement of multiple neural pathways outside of the hippocampus [3]. Auditory sensory input undergoes initial processing in a different location of the brain than visual sensory input. To encode and store this sensory information, additional structures are needed. This neural process of memory formation seems nearly as intricate as Betty and Barney’s tale!
However, it doesn’t just stop there; several other brain structures are also involved in memory formation, such as the neocortex and amygdala. The neocortex is the largest part of the cerebral cortex, characterized by the wrinkly layer of tissue that covers the surface of the brain. It is responsible for sensory perception, motor commands, spatial reasoning, and elements of language. Sensory perception is defined as the processing of an element in the environment, while spatial reasoning refers to an individual’s capacity to picture objects in 3-dimensional space and draw conclusions about them based on limited information. Interestingly, the neocortex also acts as a storage unit; memories that were temporarily stored in the hippocampus can also be stored in the neocortex as everyday knowledge. The amygdala, on the other hand, is responsible for attaching emotional significance to memories. Memories with strong emotional ties are the hardest to forget, regardless if the memory formation was accurate or falsely conceived. For example, because fear is a particularly powerful emotion, overpowering other strong emotions like joy or shame, memories associated with fear are more likely to be ingrained in our long-term memory. Thus, the stability, or propensity for the long-term duration, of a memory is largely determined by interactions between the hippocampus, neocortex, and amygdala.
However, while the brain has developed these complex processes for memory formation and storage, it still lacks a foolproof mechanism for differentiating between real and false encoded information. This means that false memories can be remembered as real ones, though these are typically only constructed in a susceptible state of mind when information is suggested as real, or when a prior experience is confused with a new one [4]. The incorporation of this information resembles the slow addition of small strokes to a painting of a village; a dash of green on a villager’s arm, a splotch of purple on a cloud, a tinge of red on a building. Each revisit to that same memory will lead to more and more strokes of paint added onto the original painting, until the villagers’ skin is green and the sky is purple: a completely changed scene.
Memories characterized by something fearful, such as being experimented on by unfamiliar beings, are particularly memorable. The sensory system, hit with flashy, fresh stimuli, desires to learn every detail it can about this incoming information. Simultaneously, parallel neurological processes work to determine the importance of retaining these details. While visual features of the stimuli are processed in the visual brain region, the auditory and tactile features are synchronously processed elsewhere.
But how does the brain decide whether or not this potential memory should take precedence over other incoming stimuli? New stimuli, referred to as novel stimuli, have high salience (prominence of a stimuli and the likelihood it will be remembered) when compared to repeating stimuli [3]. Earlier, we also examined the importance of cultural relevance in salience. The UFO and the extraterrestrial figures offer a double punch of both cultural relevance and novelty, making them fantastic candidates for encoding. Further, emotion inhabits another key role in memory, with memories generated on the basis of the valence, or the attractiveness or aversiveness, of the emotion [4]. An attractive emotion, such as excitement, has “positive valence,” whereas an aversive emotion, such as fear, has “negative valence.” Emotions that lie on either end of this scale, such as highly positive or negative ones, are more likely to be remembered. In the Hills’ case, fear of the alien lifeforms provided negative valence, while the overall traumatic experience created high arousal, as the situation contained many novel stimuli. These, combined with the physical and psychosomatic trauma the Hills allegedly endured while aboard the saucer, created the perfect memory-encoding storm. So, their brains went to work on the long-term neocortex storage of their Encounter with the Third Kind.
It’s important to note, though, that many experiences may be encoded even without the salient features present in the Hills’ alleged abduction. The brain subconsciously notices countless stimuli in our environment, leading to some passive integration of stimuli into memory. Aside from this small bit of subconscious encoding, most of the information we recall best, or is stored in long-term memory the longest, is the result of conscious processing. Conscious processing occurs when an individual is aware and in control. In this way, we do have some autonomous control over what we remember vividly. Of course, there are exceptions to this, such as the impact of emotions and stimulus novelty on the stickiness of a memory. There are also many situations that can disrupt the typical memory processing chain, generating mild to severe encoding failures. One example is being in an altered state of consciousness, such as sleep or hallucination, both of which are capable of reducing one's ability to consciously evaluate the accuracy of the “memory.” Thus, memory processing is highly dependent on the situation at hand and the state of the individual’s brain.
Sleep Deprivation and Hypnosis: When are You Susceptible to Suggestion?
The Hills’ journey home was fueled by black coffee purchased from a diner and chugged quickly before hitting the road around 10:30 pm. Given the long days of travel before and the hours of driving ahead, one can assume that Barney was partially sleep deprived at the wheel. Sleep is heavily involved in the process of translating memories from the short-term bank into a long-term savings facility [6]. In addition to memory translation, sleep is also responsible for replenishing your ability to encode details more accurately. Sleep deprivation, then, runs the risk of increasing inconsistencies when encoding memories and recalling personal events.
But can sleep deprivation also lead to false memory formation? In 2016, researchers investigated this proposed link using two memory tasks: learning a list of semantically related words, and “misleading” the subject before asking them to recall a memory. The tasks were both designed to determine if, and how much of, the false information was encoded while playing with the same key memory salience characteristics mentioned earlier: stimulus novelty and emotional valence. Researchers found that partial sleep deprivation significantly elevated faulty encoding while having a smaller impact memory recall [6]. The prevalence of memory encoding failures may help to provide a potential explanation for why the Hills encoded the wrong story but remembered it in fantastic detail. The ability to provide such detail is oddly striking; wouldn’t more details make the abduction harder to recall? Interestingly, perhaps not. Another study found that certain types of details can be stored in large amounts, actually enhancing these memories [7]. Any detail an individual sees as relevant to themselves is associated with stronger memories. Cultural context is critical, as you’re more likely to falsely remember an event that somehow makes sense; are there contextual details that would further suggest this particular detail is likely? Have you seen these details or images around you [7]? From the Hills onward, alien abductions were marked by the deeply personal trauma abductees endured. The attacks harmed the body, and were therefore inherently personal. And although most people would probably not jump to “alien abduction” to explain the development of their bumps and bruises, the prevalence of these narratives provides a tantalizing explanation for otherwise unexplained trauma. The usage of an abduction narrative is typically presented under a semi-specific set of factors, but nonetheless, they remain omnipresent in the cultural fabric of American mythos.
When the Hills began attending hypnosis sessions with Simon, they were initially seen separately for confidentiality reasons. Simon claims that the abduction claims appeared fast and furious; Barney’s retelling was riddled with frequent emotional outbursts, and Betty had been dreaming of the events for months so her final account mimicked the dreams closely. According to Barney, Betty would often cry out in the night and experience periods of intense sleep paralysis and hallucinations. Despite being separated for the majority of sessions, Betty and Barney produced similar narratives while in hypnotic regression. Simon chose to dig deeper into these claims, interfering very little during the sessions and instead opting to listen and provide occasional guidance. Hypnosis is defined as a “waking state of consciousness,” in which an individual is detached from the outer world and fully absorbed in internal experiences. It is particularly useful for increasing susceptibility to suggestion and heightening the mind-body link [8]. In hypnosis, words are used to evoke specific imagery, calling events lodged deep in the subconscious mind to the forefront. For Barney and Betty, Simon may have asked them to return to the darkness of that New Hampshire night and tell him everything they knew. Being in a hypnotic state of detachment can allow an individual to perceive a memory using their right hemisphere of the brain more than their left hemisphere. The right hemisphere is involved in symbol and image production (among many, many other tasks – it is a whole hemisphere after all!) and shows an increase in activity when we are relaxed or deeply involved in an activity. Thus, when the right hemisphere is highly active in this detached state, images can be more easily accessed from the unconscious mind and brought into the conscious mind [8]. It’s impossible to know if Simon asked leading questions directly related to extraterrestrial encounters, or if the Hills truly produced those ideas entirely on their own. Still, knowing that the Hills were entering his office with severe trauma produced under strange circumstances would motivate anyone to uncover the root cause.
It’s particularly interesting to consider how Betty’s narrative developed, as well as how this may have significantly impacted Barney’s account. As mentioned earlier, Betty had experienced a series of extraterrestrial-infused night terrors accompanied by sleep-talking, shouting, and occasional bouts of sleep paralysis. Disrupted sleep is a common somatic symptom of trauma, particularly repressed trauma, even if the memories are different from the events themselves. Disrupted sleep as a result of trauma can be infused with sleep paralysis and hallucinations. Paralysis occurs when an individual awakens from Rapid-Eye-Movement, or REM sleep, and is often accompanied by tactile and visual hallucinations [9]. These hallucinations can be mistakenly viewed as a “reliving” of past experiences or encoded as entirely new memories [9]. Of course, hallucinations and memories differ, but sleep, and REM sleep in particular, is an altered state of consciousness where one's ability to accurately differentiate between reality and falsity is diminished. Did Betty and Barney have an alien-themed film playing before they went to sleep? Was the theme of abduction prevalent in the Hills’ childhoods or adulthoods? Were they perhaps attacked by a group of people, and in an effort to contend with the pain of being attacked, framed it as something non-human entirely? Speculation alone is worth little, but it is worth considering the impact and influence of these different elements on the final stored memories. Just like with hypnosis, a sleeping individual is in a vulnerable state, and any of these variables could have affected the contents of the night terror.
The Importance of Recognizing and Treating Trauma, Regardless of Origin
Simon ultimately argued that Barney borrowed his narrative from snippets overheard from Betty, and Betty had misremembered her night terrors for reality [1]. It was a logician's attempt to explain the impossible. Although Simon’s analysis provided a rationale for both the matching narratives and the extremity of the experience, it fails to negate that the Hills did, in fact, encounter something in the woods that night. That particular something was also deeply distorted and responsible for the development of severe psychological perturbations.
Repressed memories, now also referred to as dissociative amnesia, are frequently mischaracterized as “materializing out of nowhere” or “appearing purely because of suggestions.” These memories remain a hotly contested topic in psychological research for neuroscientists and psychologists, with their reputation being born out of early therapeutic techniques used to examine childhood sexual trauma. More extensive cross-examination of these techniques revealed frequent instances of reinterpretation and misassigned meaning, often crossing the line into the formation of entirely false memories. These techniques were phased out as our understanding of human memory and memory formation improved. Psychologists learned that often certain aspects of trauma are relatively well-remembered, flashbacks and intrusive memories are relatively common, and complete memory loss is rare [10]. In addition, it was discovered that traumatic memories can be painted as entirely different events, with the original details being temporarily replaced by more salient details [10]. The core components of the traumatic event typically remain the same, however. The Hills did not display severe repression per say; there was a lapse in time between the beginning and end of their abduction, but their reaction and investigation of the events began relatively quickly.
As we have uncovered through an admittedly brief exploration into false memories, memories are remembered for a reason. Sometimes, the details that provide a memory’s backbone and flesh are falsified, eventually appearing twisted, deformed, even alien-like. Sometimes it isn’t this dramatic. But even an illogical narrative sticks as a memory because it is somehow salient. Repressed memories are referenced most frequently within the realm of trauma [10]. A traumatic event occurs and is characterized by extremely aversive emotions, which are difficult for an individual to bear; the memory is almost too sticky, like molasses. Its presence gums up the neurological workings of the brain, oozing out in unexpected ways. With the Hills, this dark ooze was anxiety, panic attacks, night terrors. It looks different for everyone, but it is nearly always disrupting the system, and takes time and care to be treated effectively and empathetically. Recognizing the validity of the Hills' trauma is critical; though their experience may be labeled as “false,” “whacky,” or “unsettling,” the couple still experienced life-altering consequences, both in the context of their personal battles and in the larger lens of their cultural impact.
However, within this recognition a key question still remains: did the abduction really occur? The painstakingly detailed accounts, the night terrors, and the public frenzy would certainly suggest a high degree of believability. Yet, only the Hills will ever truly know. That’s the core reality to keep in mind; their memory of that night is inevitably subjective, ever-shifting, and fallible. Our interpretation of their experience is just as fallible because sometimes, memories just aren’t correct, no matter how much we believe (or want to believe) them.
With difficult or traumatic memories, whether they are false or true can have significant implications. With the story of the Hills, their impact was both individual and collective. That fateful night drive through the White Mountains blew their understanding of life to pieces, literally. Earth was no longer the only place home to life, and not all other life forms were friendly. It rendered them psychologically disturbed, desperate for an explanation for their suffering. In the 1960s, their trauma, their healing, and their story resonated with millions. This tale of the extraterrestrial continues to have a profound impact on us all. Seeking answers to impossible questions is part of being human. Is there a God? Where do I go after I die? If I drove 76 miles unconsciously and woke up bruised and scratched, who took me and where did I go? Perhaps we don’t all turn to aliens and saucers to quell our thirst for explaining life’s uncertainties, but we all surely turn to something.
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