Fact. Alien abductions DO actually happen. Some people DO experience encounters with aliens. Autistic people do. If you are not very autistic yourself and you want to know that it is like to be worse then read accounts of people seeing and interacting with aliens.
Autistic people lose awareness of the world, including other people. As a person declines into autism, first they lose awareness of the features of individual faces around them. They are unable to communicate to any great extent and cannot read faces, do not know, therefore, the importance of eye-contact and, after a while, faces just become a blur. (the autistic person will be unaware of this, just a person in need of glasses can be unaware of how much sharper and clearer the world can be.). As this happens you will notice that the autistic person will not look you in the eye when talking. They might, e.g., watch your mouth instead.
As the autism becomes worse there is ever greater loss of awareness. In very severe cases the autistic person experiences the world as a ‘sea of emotion’ populated by shadows. Nothing, and especially not other people, has more substance to them than a shadow.
At the stage of experiencing alien encounters the autistic person is still aware of other people as solid and real beings, but they do not identify with them. At this stage, the person has no perception of people, including themselves, as ‘human beings’ i.e., as being all, essentially, alike. So they cannot make any connection between themselves and other people, cannot use themselves as a ‘standard model’ through which to understand other people. Other people are a mystery to them, are ‘aliens’.
In the west this condition appears as a preoccupation with ‘personality’ rather than what might be called ‘common humanity’. People classify themselves as angry/sassy/shy/optimistic/assertive, or whatever, as though these are what define them as people, whereas, in reality, these are all surface qualities which can be changed, if change is wanted. People are perceived as being scientists, or artists, or being talented at chess, or some sport or whatever, whereas all that is being described is the set of skills and abilities that they happen to have at that moment. Their ‘common humanity’ lies in the fact that any of them can acquire the skills and abilities of any other of them ---- it’s just a matter of wanting and then practicing.
A person in the west will experience horror and abhorrence at an ex-concentration camp guard, or an ex-prison guard from the gulags. However, in Russia the ex-gulag guards have returned to normal society without fuss or recrimination. They live next door to, and rub shoulders with, the former inmates, some of whom they may actually have guarded. Ask a Russian, even one who spent time as a prisoner in the gulags, how he can bear to have an ex-gulag guard living next door to him and he will shrug and say, “there but for the grace of God go I.” That is what it is to see other people as people and not as aliens.
So autistic people come to perceive other people as aliens (though, of course, they have not the self-awareness to be able to know or tell of this.) As I said, there is a loss of awareness of the individuality of faces and so one of the most common types of alien is the one with the large, bland-faced head with the big eyes. At this point the autistic person has lost the ability to read faces, is probably ceasing to look people in the eye, but is yet aware that other people DO look directly at them — hence the big eyes — “all the better to see you with.”
Continue to unpack the metaphor of, perhaps the most common alien encounter, the one where the abductee gets taken on board an alien space ship where he is experimented upon, and often given injections: this is an autistic person’s experience of interacting with another person. They have no understanding of the world. They cannot make themselves properly understood nor can they properly understand. They experience not being able to get what they want, but do not know why. They experience demands being made upon them but do not know why and the demands seem ‘unreasonable’, or ‘groundless’ — this is the space-ship: everything is mystifying, there are no points of reference, and they experience restrictions and impositions, and have alien meanings ‘injected’ into the things they say. And all this can only be related to some mysterious purpose of the aliens.
So, autistic people do experience alien encounters. These are experienced as ‘real’, though another person who cannot see the aliens would call it ‘hallucinating’.
But, like any dream experience, like out-of-body-experiences for example, the hallucination has a purpose: it reveals the state of mind of the person. Then, once you understand the condition, you can treat it and cure it.
