LEWISTON – She talks to people who believe they’ve been abducted by aliens.
Stephanie Kelley-Romano doesn’t believe it actually happens, but that doesn’t matter. People in the 130 narratives she has collected for a forthcoming book believe it like they believe the grass is green. The way some people, she says, believe in God.
Each abduction is, perhaps, oddly telling.
Within the stories of little gray men who scoop people out of bed at night, the Bates College assistant rhetoric professor says she finds lots of parallels with religion, lots of commentary on race relations and a displaced public unease over technology.
Kelley-Romano began her research as a doctoral student at the University of Kansas. She liked the mystery and detective work on “X-Files.” She was also fascinated by self-professed abductees, the language they use to make claims and how pop culture has so thoroughly embraced the alien, but so ridiculed anyone who’s seen one.
She has met research subjects at UFO conferences and over the Web.
Just over half of her subjects are female. Almost 87 percent Caucasian. They were more likely than average to have some sort of higher education and many were former Christians.
“Yet as a society, this is a group of people we believe live in trailers in the deep South (and) have no teeth,” she said.
Four or five had experiences in Maine.
A basic theme runs through most abduction stories: There’s almost always a bright light. A cold metal table, a medical procedure, conversation. People are sent home with a telltale sign, like pj’s inside out or implants.
“Most people remember being abducted from the crib,” Kelley-Romano said. It’s something that happens multiple times over a lifetime. If it hasn’t happened for that first time by age 30, it’s not likely it ever will.
Aliens usually are one of three types: white, “Nordic,” tall, friendly and benevolent; gray worker bees, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”-kind; or reptilian with no consideration for humanity who visit for breeding. (About 25 subjects firmly believe they have one or two alien parents.)
Most of her subjects fall into one of two camps, Kelley-Romano said: Aliens are good or aliens are bad. (The “good” camp considers themselves “experiencers,” not abductees.)
She began collecting narratives in the late 1990s, with all its unrest over the coming new millennium.
“When I first started doing this it definitely seemed like the bad aliens were having a go,” she said.
That’s changed in recent years: “They definitely lean toward the more metaphysical, positive.”
She reads the phenomenon as a myth, a prevailing story.
“Alien abduction is basically a religious system in the making,” she said. Abductees feel chosen, special and needed, even if what they believe they encountered hurts.
She has an article coming out this fall, “The Modern Mythmaking of Alien Abduction” in Communications Quarterly. Among other works, she’ll contribute a chapter, “Makin’ Whoopi: Race, Gender, and The Starship Enterprise” to a book coming out in 2007.
Kelley-Romano teaches “Rhetoric of Alien Abduction” and “Rhetoric of Myth and Narrative” at Bates.
She says she’s open to the idea of extraterrestrial life: “I am cautiously waiting for evidence.”
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