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Alien abduction (also called abduction phenomenon, alien abduction syndrome, or UFO abduction) refers to the phenomenon of people reporting what they believe to be the real experience of being kidnapped by extraterrestrial beings and subjected to physical and psychological experimentation. People claiming to have been abducted are usually called "abductees" or "experiencers". Most scientists and mental health professionals explain these experiences by factors such as suggestibility (e.g. false memory syndrome), sleep paralysis, deception, and psychopathology.

Typical claims involve forced medical examinations that emphasize the subject's reproductive systems. Abductees sometimes claim to have been warned against environmental abuses and the dangers of nuclear weapons, or to have engaged in interspecies breeding. The contents of the abduction narrative often seem to vary with the home culture of the alleged abductee.

Reports of the abduction phenomenon have been made all around the world, but are most common in English-speaking countries, especially the United States. The first alleged alien abduction claim to be widely publicized was the Betty and Barney Hill abduction in 1961. UFO abduction claims have declined since their initial surge in the mid-1970s, and alien abduction narratives have found less popularity in mainstream media.

Betty and Barney Hill

It’s only fair that we begin with one of the most famous UFO and alien abduction cases in history: the Betty and Barney Hill case. The two were driving on a road in New Hampshire at night when a bright light seemed to start following them. When they eventually got home, it was daylight, their clothes were dirty and ripped, their watches had stopped working—and they couldn’t remember a thing. During sessions with a psychiatrist, they later recalled being probed and violated by aliens during an abduction. The case was investigated by Project Blue.

Under hypnosis Betty was able to redraw the map the alien leader had shown her.

Since then this basic story has been repeated so often by others. The circumstances are the same; nighttime abduction by little grey men, bizarre and unpleasant medical tests, release, amnesia of the events followed by nightmares and eventual total recall under hypnosis. Retelling alien abduction reports and circulating rumours of government coverups of saucer crashes have been the meat and drink of UFOlogy since the 1980s (actually attempting to observe and analyse UFOs in the sky is a very minor part of UFOlogical studies it seems). As it is the prototype alien abduction narrative, Barney and Betty’s adventure has been hugely influential (it was was dramatised for TV in 1975 as The UFO Incident), inspiring thousands of flights of fancy in the years that followed. What makes this account more than just another tall tale that many people have copied is the claim that Betty Hill had astronomical knowledge unavailable in 1964. If true, this is truly astonishing, possibly suggesting that the Hill’s account really happened.

Under hypnosis Betty was able to redraw the map the alien leader had shown her. Betty was vague about what the map actually showed; sometimes she referred to as showing stars and planets. Her sketch was reproduced in books and magazines. In the late 1960s, a teacher called Marjorie Fish (1932-2013) tried to compare the map with real nearby stars and see if any matched. This would not be an easy task as there were about a thousand stars within 50 light years of the Sun. To make things easier, Fish made a series of sensible assumptions based on how similar to us the aliens seemed, suggesting their home planet was very similar to Earth. Based on data that was accurate at that time, she eliminated.

• All non-main sequence stars (habitable planets are unlikely to survive their star’s transition to red giant)
• All variable stars (it is difficult to see how life could arise on their planets because the huge temperature variations)
• Stars of class F4 or higher (these would have much shorter lifetimes than our Sun, so less time for life to arise)
• Multiple star systems where the stars were too close together (stable planetary orbits seem impossible)
• M class red dwarfs (potential planets would be tidally locked, Fish and others assume this would prevent complex life arising, but this is not universally agreed).

After this sifting process (which would have eliminated about 90% of the stars in the 50 light year radius), Fish was left with 46 stars. Using data from the 1969 edition of the Gliese Catalog of Nearby Stars, for nearly five years Fish painstakingly constructed several three-dimensional models of the Sun’s stellar neighbourhood from wire and beads. She viewed these from every possible angle, hoping to find a pattern matching the Hill map, a long and very difficult process. It is impossible to criticise the effort Fish made. Eventually she found almost a perfect match! It seemed that the map drawn by Betty Hill accurately depicted the stars near our own. All the stars lay roughly on the same plane and the aliens apparently came from the Zeta Reticulum system. The view point was from slightly above the star Zeta 2 Reticuli.

Mainstream scientists reject claims that the phenomenon literally occurs as reported. According to John E. Mack, a psychiatrist who gave credence to such claims, most of those who report alien abductions and believe their experiences were real are sane, common people, and psychopathology was associated only with some cases. Mack reported that some abduction reports are quite detailed, and an entire subculture has developed around the subject, with support groups and a detailed mythos explaining the reasons for abductions: The various aliens (Greys, Reptilians, "Nordics" and so on) are said to have specific roles, origins, and motivations. Abduction claimants do not always attempt to explain the phenomenon, but some take independent research interest in it themselves and explain the lack of greater awareness of alien abduction as the result of either extraterrestrial or governmental interest in cover-up.