UFOs, Personality and the "Visitor Experience"

by Dr. Rafael A. Lara Palmeros

In UFO research, the "visitor experience" is a central theme in normal people who report UFO phenomena, and has been reported in a variety of forms over the centuries. Following the experience, there are behavioral changes and alterations in the perception and interpretation of unusual events.

The "visitor experience" is a more intense variant of the "sense of presence", a phenomenon frequently reported by normal people (approximately 30% out of 500 adults who have been evaluated in neuroscience laboratories over the past 15 years have reported such experiences. The presence is felt most frequently in the early morning hours, if the person is asleep, and he/she will awaken suddenly, often feeling a sense of fear or immobility. These experiences are thought to be correlated with mesiobasal (amygdaloid-hypnocampal) portions of the temporal lobes. These areas of the brain are associated, inter alia, with the experience of meaningfulness, the sense of self and its relationship to space-time (with its religious or "cosmic" association), fear, dreams, the experience of movement (such as spinning or floating), smell, and the retrieval and storage of memory. Consequently, there should be--and there are--references to a sense of presence, feelings of spinning or floating, or vibrations, dreamlike sequences and fear (or irritability). Given that an important part of the temporal lobe receives visual information from the edges of the visual field, flickering sensations can occur in upper peripheral vision.

If the neural substrate of the "visitor experience" is characterized by transient electrochemical fluctuations within the temporal lobe structure, then: a) the phenomenological nature of these experiences should reflect temporal lobe functions, and b) people with personality profiles that are strongly correlated with temporal lobe lability should be prone to having these experiences. Both of these observations have been substantiated by clinical evidence. That either endogenous or exogenous (surgical) stimulation of deep temporal lobe structures--such as the hippocampus and especially the amygdala, can evoke specific pheonmenological patterns, is well established. Patients with partial complex or limbic (temporal lobe) epilepsy frequently report such symptoms as a sense of a presence; depersonalization (feelings of unreality or out-of-the-body experiences); hearing and/or knowing from  "internal sources", vestibular sensations, anxiety or panic. Females may have erotic experiences. Visual phenomena vary from shadows, entities or colors in the peripheral field to complex animated sequences dominated by substantial fantasy elements that are not always simple reiterations of personal experience.

Most importantly, the percipient is frequently convinces the what he or she has perceived is real; although details may not be clear, the person is sure that something profound has occurred.

Typical behaviors betweens seizures included a widening of affect; multiple references to psi phenomena; the conviction that one has communed with an entity or god and has been chosen for a special destiny; hypergraphia--obsession with themes such as the nature of the universe--and the desire to proselytize. Invariably there is amnesia and a history of time loss. Affective disorders and alterations in sexual behavior are common. There is now evidence of a continuum of temporal lability or sensitivity. People who display complex partial epilepsy without convulsions occupy the extreme portion of this continuum.

One prototypic account of "visitor experience" offers ample support to the temporal lobe factor: Whitley Streiber's Communion, a classic UFO abduction report. The experience was associated with the predominant metaphor of the sense of a presence, swirling or vortical sensations, internal vibrations, floating sensations, alterations in perception, frank psi phenomena and a deep sense of meaning. The person developed the conviction that he was chosen, and the desire emerged to deliver the cosmic message to mankind. The experience was invariably considered to be "real".

Streiber's description of fundamentally aversive sensations (associated with intense smells, hypervigilance and anal sphincter images) should reflect anomalous activity within the anterior parahippocampal gyrus, with special involvement of the amygdaloid complex and the adjacent uncus.

One of the most common features of the UFO experience is the encounter with small humanoids who often have large heads, thus resembling a human foetus. There is evidence that these experiences are adult modifications of perinatal memories. It has been established that the foetus has the cerebral capacity to detect and consolidate the experience.

On the other hand, severe trauma, such as early sexual abuse, could be equally effective because of the consequent repression of unpleasant memories serving as source material for the experience. The importance of the temporal lobe factor is strongly suggested by the moderate intercorrelations in patient populations between temporal lobe epilepsy, multiple personality disorders and early child abuse.