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Recently in Salon Health & Body

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By Mary Roach

July 30, 1999 |David Jacobs has an interesting collection of stains. He collects the mysterious little stains that people notice on their clothes after returning from an alien abduction. The stains happen during the medical examination that abductees typically report being subjected to. Jacobs interviews people about these things during hypnosis sessions.

Jacobs is not himself an abductee. He teaches history at Temple University in Philadelphia. Oddly, Jacobs' stain collection does not include the stubborn blot that one assumes such activities would leave upon one's academic reputation. Ditto alien abduction author John Mack, who wrote the forward for Jacobs' latest book. Mack is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "We believe in academic freedom," said Harvard spokesman Bill Schaller when I called to verify Mack's post. Schaller didn't think Professor Mack was an embarrassment to Harvard. "They're all weird and embarrassing one way or another," he said.

Jacobs, for his part, is a seemingly ordinary guy who listens to "Prairie Home Companion" and raises two boys and just happened to get interested in aliens, enough to write his dissertation and three books on the topic. I called Jacobs because I was curious about the alien examination. I wondered what it would be like to be a patient, and whether it could actually be more frightening than my recent visit to a major metropolitan emergency room. What are the aliens checking for? How's their bedside manner? Do they make you wear humiliating paper garments? I would hope that a civilization that has figured out intergalactic travel would have a handle on dignified johnny design.

Mary Roach Mary Roach's column appears in Salon Health & Body every other Friday. + Biography + Archives

Having interviewed 135 abductees, who have had, between them, 525 such exams, Dr. Jacobs had answers to all my questions. He also had answers to questions I didn't ask, like "How do they get the sperm samples out of male abductees?" More on this later.

Like medical exams here in our own planetary system, the alien exam begins in a poorly decorated waiting room. ("No aesthetic sense whatsoever," said Jacobs, a bit harshly. "No posters, no scenic scenes of broken rowboats on the beach.") The alien medics, while distinct from our physicians in many ways (no fee or copayment has ever been charged for an alien medical exam), seem to share the basic disrespect for their patients' time. "If it's a very busy ship -- let's say there are 20 tables and they've abducted 40 people -- there can be quite a delay." Do they at least have a decent reading selection? "Nope. No magazines. People just sort of sit there with their clothes off in specially constructed alcoves with their tongues hanging out, eyes rolled back." I wondered whether Jacobs had considered the possibility that these people were confusing alien abduction with certain sectors of the Los Angeles club scene, but then he went on to describe the exam.

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