The turn to abduction has reformatted the UFO discourse. Truth claims previously made in scientific and legal languages are expressed in a familiar hegemonic therapeutic discourse. The language and practice of therapy, moreover, have given UFOs and aliens a legitimacy in mainstream circles that they previously lacked. Arguments in the psychology community over abduction memories seem but a variation of the debates around false-memory syndrome. Accounts of alien abduction can now claim to fulfill established scientific criteria for truth on the basis of resemblance: they look like other accounts of improbable events defended through psychological evidence. Now, because of therapy language, the witness counts. The witness can enter into the scientific discourse as a participant whose words carry with them the presumption that they will be heard. The witness speaks of her own experience, using this experience as itself the authorization to speak. Put somewhat differently, because of the link to therapy culture, ufology has been able to defend more successfully the credibility of the witness. Therapy language enables the witness to appeal to experience without having to establish in advance the reality of that experience. Perception becomes reality.
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The juridical-political credibility of ufology has also been reconfigured through the installation of therapy language. On the one hand, the stress on therapy brings with it “recovery movement” connotations of personal acceptance and self-transformation. Here, the abduction experience is an individual matter that might be discussed in group therapy, not a political concern. Nonetheless, some abduction therapists inscribe their treatment techniques with a rights language. Legal discourse becomes law talk, a set of useful metaphors for a legalistic culture. Talking law, the abductees reenter the political discourse that excluded UFO witnesses in the fifties and sixties. For example, drawing from her work with an attorney who had difficulty overcoming his “mental blocks regarding ‘talking about aliens’” (blocks caused by the aliens’ usual injunction to secrecy), Jean Byrne suggests that abductees understand “the ‘Corporate Veil’ analogy and realize that the same principles apply to alien information” and “the ‘Clean Hands Doctrine’ which is one of the eight principles of equity.”
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On the other hand, the merging of legal and therapeutic languages, like the convergence with ideas of scientific proof, permits the construction of imagined associations, equivalences, and unities between alien abduction and issues of harm that have been central to some feminist, antiracist, and queer politics. Stressing the widespread denial of abduction and the government’s likely complicity in a cover-up, Westrum concludes: “Consider how badly we have handled the AIDS problem and you will get some idea of what is likely to happen with abductions.” Also concerned with “government cover-up, surveillance and conspiracy,” Mack recounts the discussions from his support group and their concerns with future organization and planning. He writes: “This includes the beginning realization that the patronizing, cynical attitude of some media shows and coverage, including the participation of a hostile debunker (usually called a ‘skeptic’) on a program, constitutes a human rights violation of an authentic minority.”
– Aliens in America (1998), pp. 52-4