Michael Shermer

Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, is the director of the Skeptics Society. He is the author of Denying History and Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time. In the following selection, he describes an experience in which he believed aliens had taken over the bodies of his friends. However, he was extremely sleep deprived at the time and was hallucinating. Although he realizes it was a hallucination, the memory is still very clear and strong in his mind. He believes that other accounts of alien abductions are influenced by hypnosis, hallucinations, and sleep paralysis.

On Monday, August 8, 1983, I was abducted by aliens. It was late at night and I was traveling along a lonely rural 67 highway approaching the small town of Haigler, Nebraska, when a large...