Susan Blackmore

Background

Susan Blackmore was born in London on 29 July 1951. She read psychology and physiology at St Hilda's College, Oxford (BA, 1973), took an MSc in environmental psychology at the University of Surrey in 1974, and completed a PhD in parapsychology at Surrey in 1980, per her Wikipedia biography.

She spent much of the 1980s running psychokinesis experiments. Her views moved from belief toward scepticism over those years; she was given the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry's Distinguished Skeptic Award in 1991. She taught at the University of the West of England in Bristol until 2001, has been a consulting editor of Skeptical Inquirer since 1998, and is now a visiting professor at the University of Plymouth. Her popular books include The Meme Machine (1999, with a foreword by Richard Dawkins) and Consciousness: An Introduction (2003).

The abduction research (1994–1998)

In 1994 she presented Close Encounters, a BBC2 Horizon documentary. According to her own website, the programme followed her from abductees to UFO researchers and then to a leading psychiatrist who believed the abductees' accounts. She also learned about sleep paralysis and tested Michael Persinger's "God Helmet" during the filming. The same year she wrote a New Scientist cover story, "Alien abduction" (19 November 1994).

Her main abduction paper, "Abduction by Aliens or Sleep Paralysis?", appeared in Skeptical Inquirer in 1998 (vol. 22, pp. 23–28). It took aim at the most cited statistic in the field. The Roper supplement, released in 1992 and designed and analysed by Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs, interviewed 5,947 adults. About 2% reported four or five of five indicators, including waking paralysed with a sense of a presence and a feeling of flying. Scaled to a US population of about 185 million, that produced an estimate of 3.7 million abductees. A reprint of the article summarises her counter-test.

Blackmore's study used 126 schoolchildren and 224 university students. Each heard a typical abduction story, drew an alien, and filled in a questionnaire built on the Roper items, plus questions about false awakenings and television viewing. Alien-knowledge scores and reported experiences were not correlated. Students who drew grey aliens scored higher on alien knowledge but did not report more experiences. Among adults, heavier TV viewing tracked both grey drawings and higher alien scores. Her conclusion was that "the popular stereotype is obtained more from television programs than from having been abducted by real aliens." She read the Roper result as evidence against its validity, and argued that hypnagogic and hypnopompic states, in which dreams and sleep paralysis overlap with waking, could account for many reports. The reprint cites a 2008 study by French and colleagues that found self-reported sleep paralysis more common among "experiencers" than among matched controls.

The design has limits. It used student samples and a questionnaire rather than clinical interviews with people who believed they had been abducted, so it tests what participants know and imagine about abductions more than what happened to any individual claimant.

A review of the abduction literature (2006)

In a March 2006 review in Times Higher Education of Susan Clancy's Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens, Blackmore called the book engaging and readable. She agreed with Clancy that people who believe they were abducted are reasonably adopting the explanation that makes most sense to them, that abduction narratives draw on shared cultural material such as television and film, and that fantasy-proneness helps predispose some people. She also criticised the book for light methodology, including no clear account of how many people were interviewed or how they were chosen. She added that it glosses over controversies and does not explain the neurophysiology of tunnel imagery or of the sleep-paralysis symptoms behind many abduction details. Her review also doubts Clancy's claim to have read every published abduction account, and notes that the stories vary more than critics often assume.

Assessment

Blackmore's UFO work is a small part of a career that is mostly about consciousness, memes and the psychology of belief. Within ufology, her significance is that she framed abduction reports as testable claims and set out a specific prediction, that a stereotype learned from television should outweigh personal experience in what people draw and know. The responses of Hopkins, Jacobs and other abduction researchers to her study are not covered in the sources used here, so the debate is presented only from her side. Her sleep-paralysis account is a naturalistic explanation that the reprinted article supports with the 2008 French et al. study, but how far it accounts for individual cases is not settled by the material reviewed here.

Blackmore is a well-documented sceptic, not a debunker of UFOs as such. Her work is best read as an evaluation of the claims that abduction researchers have made about population-level prevalence and the reliability of memory-based accounts.