It’s no coincidence that the symptoms of sleep paralysis match up almost perfectly to those of alien abduction. In both cases, victims feel physically pinned down while sensing a sinister foreign presence.  Each element of the abduction story can be generated neurologically, including the aliens themselves.  In fact, by stimulating the temporal lobes of volunteers, neuroscientists have successfully elicited the feeling of contact with shadowy figures.

Sleep paralysis appears to be an excellent explanation for the typical alien abduction story, yet the topic of alien abduction has not been put to rest and there continue to be reports of incidents, week after week. The question is: when a rational person suffers an episode of sleep paralysis, why does he elect to believe something as irrational as an extraterrestrial encounter as the underlying cause?

When the brain is confronted with confusing or contradictory signals, it instinctively seeks out a way to reconcile them. For example, consider the case of the Cotard delusion, a psychiatric condition in which people believe themselves to be dead. In the brain, it’s thought to arise from a broken connection between the sensory and emotional systems. As a result, patients develop a strange symptom: when they see familiar people, they don’t feel any emotion toward them. Even when seeing their closest friends or family, they feel a mysterious emotional distance. They feel disconnected from others, removed from the world.