are you the same person you were a minute ago?
135
workers and psychologists would go to implant memories in young minds was revealed. The trauma of the accusations, which often led to the break-up of families and wrongful prosecutions has been well documented; what has been less well documented is what amounts to the destruction of the self for some of these children. Individuals with happy memories of their parents and loved ones have been replaced by unhappy individuals who ‘remember’ horrid events which did not happen – disturbances to the self which remained in place even after the falsehood of the claims was revealed. In some senses, new individuals have been created out of nothing. Less serious is the strange phenomenon of alien abduction. It is hard to know just how many people now believe that they have been abducted by aliens, taken aboard their spacecraft and subjected to often humiliating medical experiments, but some estimates put the numbers well into the hundreds of thousands or more. One survey suggested that 1% of the US population (3 million people) are convinced that they have been abducted – an extraordinary statistic if true. This is not a uniquely American phenomenon, but Americans certainly dominate the lists of abductees. Sometimes people have continuous, unbroken memories of experiences which include alien abduction. Far more often, the abduction event is ‘revealed’ through the medium of therapy or hypnosis. The experience is seen by many as key to understanding whatever neurotic conditions may be troubling them, and therapists assure them that the recollection of being ‘taken’ is cathartic and therapeutic. Of course, we have no evidence that any human being has ever been abducted by aliens, so we must assume that these recollections are bogus – either these people or lying, or they have had memories – false fragments of self – implanted by their therapists.