All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
Nov. 21, 2006 - Skeptoid
11:54
Skeptoid #8: Nocturnal Assaults: Aliens in the Dark

Alien abductions and Old Hags: things that go bump in the night. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
Ancient Tales of Nocturnal Assaults 00:05:31
Call them nocturnal assaults?
Call them sleep paralysis?
They happen to all sorts of people all around the world with very little predictability.
You wake up frozen, perhaps with a visible entity in the room, perhaps unable to move, perhaps feeling a weight.
These common sleep disorders are probably nearly entirely responsible for the phenomenon of alien abduction.
Aliens in the dark are coming up next on Skeptoid.
Hi, I'm Alex Goldman.
You may know me as the host of Reply All, but I'm done with that.
I'm doing something else now.
I've started a new podcast called Hyperfixed.
On every episode of Hyperfixed, listeners write in with their problems and I try to solve them.
Some massive and life-altering, and some so minuscule it'll boggle your mind.
No matter the problem, no matter the size, I'm here for you.
That's Hyperfixed, the new podcast from Radiotopia.
Find it wherever you listen to podcasts or at hyperfixedpod.com.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Nocturnal Assaults.
Aliens in the Dark.
I was five years old when my single mother was attacked by a ghost in her bed in the middle of the night.
She awoke suddenly under the pressure of two unseen hands, pushing her down flat against the bed and holding her there.
For several minutes, she struggled, unable to speak or move.
Finally, she broke free and scrambled out of the room and spent the rest of the night on the floor of the room that my brother and I shared.
She never went back into her own bedroom alone again.
And so I grew up with this history, hearing ghost stories from time to time that other people told, but knowing that we had actually had a real ghost in our home when I was young.
I was an inveterate reader of books about monsters and ghosts, everything from Bigfoot to Dracula, from Banshees to fairies, from zombies to werewolves.
And one subject that particularly piqued my interest was that of nocturnal assaults.
Nocturnal assaults are attacks just like that suffered by my mother, though often more graphic.
The attacker can sometimes be a visible apparition.
I was highly intrigued to learn that the physical descriptions of the attackers have been eerily similar over the ages, varying by country and sometimes by century.
In Anglo cultures, the most common attacker is called the old hag, a terrifying old woman dressed in black rags who holds her victims down in their beds or even sits on their chests with her full weight.
References to the old hag and her nocturnal assaults go back as far as the Middle Ages.
She's been part of our history for so long that if you haven't slept well, you're said to look haggard.
In India, she is the Mohini, a beautiful but deadly enchantress.
As often as the Anglo-attacker is described to look like an old hag, attackers in India are just as frequently described as a beautiful young woman with terrible powers.
In Slavic cultures, the most frequent description is of an elf-like gypsy man with wild glowing eyes who sits on your chest, riding you like a horse.
The more I researched it, the more cultural groups I found to have their own unique nocturnal assault perpetrators.
As a budding young scholar of the supernatural, I was fascinated by these cultural commonalities, similar attacks throughout history made by specific attackers who stayed within their own cultural communities.
But then, in the late 1960s, things changed.
A new attacker began muscling in on the old hag's territory, but quickly took over responsibility for most of the attacks reported in the United States.
Do you know who I'm referring to yet?
In 1965, Betty and Barney Hill went public with an episode they said happened to them in 1961, when they were abducted from their car by aliens and suffered terrible medical experiments aboard a spacecraft.
Curiously, the attack they described bore no resemblance to a classical nocturnal assault.
However, the creature they described, an alien of the type we commonly call a gray, became America's new supernatural superstar.
Nocturnal assaults continued to happen at the same frequency that they always had, but now the reported attacker was, more often than not, a gray alien.
The gray alien burst upon the scene of America's consciousness just as the old hag was beginning to seem a little outdated and, well, haggard.
Just as children in India grew up with stories of the Mohini as the evil specter who might paralyze you in the middle of the night, we're now in a generation of Americans who have heard that gray aliens are those little beings who are going to come into your bedroom at night and attack you.
Is it really as simple as that?
Is the attacker that your scared brain visualizes based solely on what your cultural experience tells you to expect?
Hey everyone, I want to remind you about a truly unique and once-in-a-lifetime adventure.
Join the Mediterranean Sailing Adventure 00:06:19
Join me and Mediterranean archaeologist Dr. Flint Dibble for a skeptoid sailing adventure through the Mediterranean Sea aboard the SV Royal Clipper, the world's largest full-rigged sailing ship.
This is also the only opportunity you'll have to hear Flint and I talk about our experiences when we both went on Joe Rogan to represent the causes of science and reality against whatever it is that you get when you're thrown into that lion pit.
We set sail from Malaga, Spain on April 18th, 2026 and finished the adventure in Nice, France on April 25th.
You'll enjoy a fascinating skeptical mini-conference at sea.
You'll visit amazing ports along the Spanish and French coasts and Flint will be our exclusive onboard expert sharing the real archaeology and history about every stop.
We've got special side quests and extra skeptical content planned at each port.
This is a true sailing ship.
You can climb the rat lines to the crow's nest, handle the sails.
You can even take the helm and steer.
This is a real bucket list adventure you don't want to miss.
But cabins are selling fast and this ship does always sell out.
Act now or you'll miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Get the full details and book your cabin at skeptoid.com slash adventures.
Hope to see you on board.
That's skeptoid.com slash adventures.
It was about 25 years after my mom's attack that I first heard of sleep paralysis, which, as you probably know, is the clinical name of these nocturnal assaults.
Sleep paralysis can be characterized by an inability to speak or move, a feeling of intense crushing weight on the chest, and or hallucinations, which can be visual, auditory, tactile, and even include strange smells.
It happens only during REM sleep, often just as its beginning or ending.
Sleep paralysis is five times more likely to happen to people sleeping on their backs, facing up.
Drugs such as Prozac have been found effective in controlling sleep paralysis attacks.
Although most sleep paralysis episodes do not include the visual apparition, more than enough do include it to account for all reported nocturnal assaults.
Sleep paralysis is well understood, well documented, and is an accepted psychological phenomenon in the medical profession.
So why then did it take me a further several years before I made the connection between my mom's attack and sleep paralysis?
I'd spent so many years fully believing that my mom had been attacked by a ghost that it never even occurred to me to seek more reasonable explanations elsewhere, even when the obvious answer was staring me in the face, literally as I was reading books about it.
Perhaps this is the same reason that even in an age where most people have at least heard of sleep paralysis, believers in alien abductions and nocturnal ghost attacks firmly stick to paranormal explanations for their own sleep paralysis experiences.
Many believers, when confronted with this explanation for their experience, will point out differences between their experience and the known symptoms of sleep paralysis.
Of course, visual, audible, and tactile hallucinations are part of the known symptoms of sleep paralysis, so it's kind of hard for them to come up with details that can't be attributed to known sleep paralysis effects.
And that's an awkward position for the scientific profession to be in.
No matter what the believer reports, we can explain it with, it's a hallucination.
That makes us sound exactly like young earth creationists explaining everything with, God did it, no further evidence needed.
The difference is that we can actually test sleep paralysis sufferers.
And whenever we do, we end up with video of them lying in their bed looking paralyzed, with a conspicuous absence of gray aliens, mohinies, or old hags in the room.
So it took over 30 years, but I finally did explain my mom's nocturnal assault, at least to my own satisfaction.
You might wonder what her own assessment is, in light of this explanation.
She went to medical school, spent her whole career in biotech, has a very scientific mind, and is convinced to this day that she was attacked by a ghost.
She never read the Betty and Barney Hill story.
Please support the show with a monthly micropayment.
That's what makes it possible.
It's my full-time job, not just a hobby.
It depends on listener support.
Please come to skeptoid.com today.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Hello, everyone.
This is Adrienne Hill from Skookum Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and moose.
And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as $5 per month.
And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double doubles.
And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar.
Why support Skeptoid?
If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, Premium is for you.
If you want to support a worthwhile nonprofit that combats pseudoscience, promotes critical thinking, and provides free access to teachers to use the podcast in the classroom via the Teacher's Toolkit, then sign up today.
Remember that skepticism is the best medicine.
Next to giggling, of course.
Until next time, this is Adrienne Hill.
From P R X
Export Selection