How might Alien Abduction Experiences relate to Out of Body Experiences?
A. Do “alien abductions” actually exist? Certainly, at least in the same sense in which “out of the bodies” exist, as psychological realities and as lived experiences. Many who have OBEs vehemently deny that they only had a dream, because it felt so real – similarly for many accounts of AAEs. Although many abductees claim that the AAE happened to them physically, usually no physical traces of evidence exist to support this claim. In such cases it seems possible that the abductions took place in the OBE state, which would account for many of the features often reported – 1. the vividness and realness of the event; 2. the substantiality of the environment, which does not seem dreamlike but physical; 3. a feeling of paralysis; 4. the experience of floating; 5. the feeling of unusual energies or vibrations. Thus, one could categorize many accounts of AAEs simply as a subtype of OBEs with one major distinction – that the locus of control changes from inside the experiencer to outside the ex
