What Alien Delusions Tell Us About Our Minds

In psychiatric hospitals and consulting rooms worldwide, one of the more unlikely-sounding but very common presenting problems involves aliens. A patient, while perhaps in a state of manic excitement, will describe being in touch with members of an alien civilisation, typically circling the earth in spaceships invisible to standard telescopes and beaming down messages about their species’ imminent arrival – which only the patient is privy to. Everyone else may follow so-called science and bluntly deny that there is anyone out there telling them anything, but the patient – ordinary though they might seem in many ways – knows otherwise. The aliens are keeping meticulous track of them, they can see them at all times, they can follow their movements (often using a special kind of Wifi) at work and in the supermarket, in their apartment and in the park. And they are sending them a stream of subtle messages about top secret information directly and discreetly into their minds (though the process might require a few technical adjustments, like making sure there’s a blue film or aluminum foil over all the windows). The psychiatrist could be sceptical, many others have been as well, but that’s their loss. It isn’t easy being the sole ambassador to a foreign civilisation about to touch down and change everything.

The point isn’t to debate whether or not any of this is true, it’s to study alien delusions because of what they tell us about the mind, and not just the minds of sufferers themselves, but human minds more broadly. As often with puzzling psychological conditions, we have to start with a very simple-sounding question about motivation: what might be the upside of such a belief? What might be satisfying about thinking in this way? Why might someone abandon standard logic and rationality in favour of ostensibly recondite beliefs? 

And here, poignantly, we quickly need to start to think about pain. It will inevitably – for reasons that time is sure to reveal – have become far easier for a patient to believe in aliens than to trust in the model of reality offered by science. The alien delusion has to be read as a persecuted mind’s ingenious, desperate but highly understandable attempt to cope with awfulness. The spaceships and the messages are – in their colourful and creative ways – a bulwark against tragedy.

A generalisation we can confidently make about almost everyone who ever presents with an alien delusion is that they had a bad childhood, usually a very bad childhood indeed. There will have been a high degree of neglect, humiliation, loneliness and coldness (and very frequently sexual and emotional abuse as well). In such conditions, the emergence of an alien delusion isn’t simple ‘madness,’ it should be interpreted as a pressured mind’s quasi ingenious attempt to find some sort of footing, some kind of explanation, some measure of relief from what would otherwise have been unsustainable cruelty.

To believe in aliens is to be offered a range of alleviating and life-sustaining thoughts. Far from being randomly neglected by the world, one is in fact the focus of very close attention from another world altogether. Far from being a mere oddity, lacking friends and feeling one doesn’t fit in because of personal deficiency, one is an outsider because of election, because of an affinity with a foreign and superior set of creatures. Earthlings may not understand one, but a whole other civilisation holds one in exceptionally high regard. The agony of having been (as it were) treated as a weird entity by one’s own parents is transmuted into a belief that one really might be an ‘alien’ in a good sense. As for the constant messages being beamed down, they mean that one is being forever kept in mind; a longing for the sort of sweet whispers that a loving parent might once have given to their baby as they slept in their cot is transmuted into a belief in signs of close love making their way invisibly through the universe.

It isn’t – we can see – ever any use telling a believer that they are ‘wrong.’ Far better to lead them, through one’s compassion, very gently, to acknowledge how hard everything has been. 

The case of alien delusions reminds us that being sane isn’t ever an achievement of logic. It is an outcome of love. It is because we have been treated well by others that we grow up to be people who can afford to stay with reality; the courage and self-belief that love endows us with are what allow us to look without flinching at the very difficult sides of the human condition – without recourse to fantasies and hallucinations. This is not some kind of cleverness or intellectual achievement, it’s a gift of kindness. We should accept too that all of us have our own versions of ‘aliens’ at certain points; delusions that are deployed as a defence against particularly sharp corners of existence. They might be politicians we idealise or communities we hate, relationships we have to destroy or sides of our characters we need to vaunt excessively. 

If we feel in any way sane today, we shouldn’t take all the credit. Someone somewhere long ago loved us deeply, and wanted us to be here – and that’s why we can, more or less, for now at least, trust in reality, engage with people on our own planet and think straight.