Emulating alien and UFO encounters in REM sleep

Raduga, M., Shashkov, A., & Zhunusova, Z. (2021). Emulating alien and UFO encounters in REM sleep. International Journal of Dream Research, 14(2), 247–256. https://doi.org/10.11588/ijodr.2021.2.78599

AI Assessment

A study testing a naturalistic explanation for alien-abduction experiences: that they can be products of REM-sleep states (lucid dreams, sleep paralysis, out-of-body experiences), and can therefore be deliberately emulated. Given the task of producing an alien or UFO encounter during a lucid-dream or related “phase state,” 114 of 152 self-selected practitioners (75%) reported succeeding, and the successful encounters were significantly more likely to involve fear or sleep paralysis. This supports the plausibility that some real abduction reports are sleep phenomena, and it is included here because ESP-Nexus audits naturalistic explanations of anomalous experience to the same standard as psi studies. Its limits are substantial: everything is self-reported by motivated enthusiasts practising unsupervised at home, with no verification that the sleep state occurred and no blinding of the researchers who coded the reports. This audit reports what the study found and how; it takes no position on the origin of alien-encounter experiences.

Provenance

DOI. 10.11588/ijodr.2021.2.78599 · International Journal of Dream Research 2021, 14(2), 247 to 256.

Study type. An online, self-report field study testing whether alien and UFO encounters (AUEs) can be deliberately generated in dissociative REM-sleep states.

Authors. Michael Raduga, Andrey Shashkov, and Zhanna Zhunusova, of the Phase Research Center (Moscow), a group specializing in lucid dreaming and related “phase” states.

Data availability. Participant reports are stored on the Project Elijah website.

Source basis. Every figure below is taken from the article’s own Summary and Results.

What the paper reports

Roughly half of alien-encounter reports involve sleep, dreams, relaxation, or sleep paralysis, and a large literature links abduction experiences to sleep paralysis, when REM atonia intrudes on wakefulness and can produce vivid hallucinations.¹ The authors reason that if some AUEs are genuinely REM-sleep products, then trained lucid-dream practitioners should be able to produce them on purpose. They therefore instructed practitioners to emulate an alien or UFO encounter during a lucid dream or other phase state, and report that most succeeded, which they take as support for the sleep-based explanation of at least some abduction experiences.

If some of AUEs are indeed the products of REM sleep, then they could be deliberately emulated by LD practitioners. Therefore, this experiment could help to explain the mystery of AUEs.

How it was run

• Participants. 152 volunteers, self-selected from the Project Elijah online platform (Russian version), who performed the task unsupervised at home and submitted one report each, having been allowed multiple attempts beforehand.
• Task. To emulate an alien or UFO encounter during a lucid dream or other “phase state” (which the authors define to include lucid dreams, sleep paralysis, out-of-body experiences, and false awakenings).
• Coding. The narrative reports were categorically coded by the researchers, including a subjective judgment of each report’s “paradoxical” status (how realistic versus dreamlike it was).
• Analysis. Chi-square tests with Bonferroni post-hoc corrections in JASP. There was no blinding and no independent verification that the phase state actually occurred.

Results, as reported

Values are reproduced from the article’s Summary and Results. The core finding is that most trained practitioners could, on request, generate an alien-encounter experience in a sleep state, and that the more realistic and fearful of these involved sleep paralysis, consistent with the sleep-paralysis account of abduction reports.

Eleven-dimension audit

Pre-registration

Not preregistered. The hypotheses are stated, but with narrative reports coded after the fact and a subjective realism judgment, the absence of a registered coding scheme leaves room for interpretation to favour the expected pattern.

Randomization

None: every participant received the same instruction, and the sample was self-selected. There is no control group of participants attempting a different emulation, so the specificity of the alien-encounter result cannot be gauged against an alternative target.

Sensory leakage

Not applicable in the perceptual sense. The relevant validity threat is the complete reliance on unverified self-report, discussed under the adversarial record.

Blinding

Absent, and consequential. Participants know the goal is to produce an alien encounter, and the researchers coded the reports (including the realism judgment) without blinding. Both the production and the scoring of the target experience are therefore open to expectancy.

Optional stopping

Participants were allowed multiple attempts before submitting a single report, which selects toward successful cases and inflates the apparent success rate relative to an all-attempts denominator.

Outcome measure

A self-reported, narrative account coded categorically by the researchers, with realism judged subjectively. This is a soft, interpreter-dependent outcome; there is no physiological confirmation that a REM or phase state occurred.

Effect size

The headline 75% success rate is large but is a self-report of a subjective task, and the significant associations (fear/sleep paralysis with success, and sleep paralysis with realism) are modest chi-square effects.

Multiple comparisons

Several factors were tested, and to the authors’ credit Bonferroni corrections were applied; most comparisons (gender, induction method, experience, ending type) were non-significant, which argues against wholesale fishing.

Internal replication

The study is described as a replication of an earlier pilot by the same group, giving some continuity, but not independent replication.

External replication

Conducted within one group’s online community; independent replication in a supervised or physiologically monitored setting would substantially strengthen the naturalistic claim.

Transparency

Reasonable: the reports are archived, the methods and statistics are described, and the authors are candid that the work rests on self-report. The transparency limits are the lack of preregistration, blinding, and any objective verification of the sleep state.

The adversarial record

• Unverified self-report by motivated participants. The whole result is that lucid-dream enthusiasts, asked to dream of aliens, reported dreaming of aliens. There is no independent confirmation that a REM or phase state occurred, no check that the emulated encounter resembles real abduction reports, and every incentive for a self-selected community to report success.
• Selection toward success. Allowing multiple attempts before a single report, with no all-attempts denominator, means the 75% figure overstates how readily such encounters are produced.
• Non-blind, subjective coding. The key realism variable was judged subjectively by unblinded researchers who knew the hypothesis, so the association between sleep paralysis and “realistic” encounters could partly reflect coder expectation.
• Plausibility, not proof. The study shows that alien-encounter experiences can be produced in sleep states, which supports the sleep-paralysis explanation as one route, but it does not establish that any given real abduction report actually arose that way. It demonstrates a possible mechanism, not the cause of the phenomenon.
• What is genuinely useful. As a test of a naturalistic hypothesis it is a reasonable first demonstration: the prediction was specific, the fear-and-sleep-paralysis association is in the expected direction, multiple corrections were applied, and the reports are archived. Audited to the same standard as the psi studies on this site, it is a suggestive but self-report-bound result that points to sleep phenomena as a candidate explanation for part of the abduction literature.