Have abductions and subsequent weird medical exams sort of dropped out of current UFO events, or am I just not recalling them as I sit here?
I don't know about abduction experiences, but I read somewhere that UFO reports generally have been in decline.
This
Wall Street Times article, "Diving into the Scarcity of UFO Sightings in Recent Years", 25 August 2023, seems to support this
https://wallstreettimes.com/diving-into-the-scarcity-of-ufo-sightings/
(but it doesn't provide figures and its clickable links are highly questionable, leading to articles of limited, if any, relevance).
If this is correct, it's counter-intuitive; the global population continues to grow and get wealthier, a significant proportion of people (I'd guess the majority in developed countries) routinely carry phones with cameras. Up to the end of the 20th century, almost no-one habitually carried a camera of any sort (many people might own one, but they tended to be used on special occasions, taken on vacations etc.)
Maybe it just isn't fashionable for ETs to visit Earth any more.
There is greater awareness of evidence that
some abductions and other strange encounters with unusual beings, which seem real to the experiencer, might be caused by sleep paralysis and other parasomnias and neurological events. That people sometimes hallucinate malign presences/ monsters/ folkloric beings during sleep paralysis is beyond doubt, and what is experienced is in part culturally-determined: Different communities have different traditional descriptions (and names) of "visitors", Wikipedia,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis.
Many people in developed nations might have limited exposure to traditional folklore, but will have had exposure from early in life to the idea of alien beings.
External Quote:
Jenny Randles and Keith Basterfield both noted at the 1992 MIT alien abduction conference that of the five cases they knew of where an abduction researcher was present at the onset of an abduction experience, the experiencer "didn't physically go anywhere".
Wikipedia, Alien abduction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_abduction
Metabunk discussed the 1992 claims of Peter Khoury in thread
Alien DNA after sexual encounter. Khoury was asleep (or at least in bed) when he sat up to find two female humanoids* had appeared.
@NorCal Dave found that Khoury had had 2 earlier strange experiences, both starting while he was in bed, both involving (a perception of) paralysis, one involved the sighting of humanoid creatures (of two very different descriptions),
post #13.
IIRC in "
Dark White: Aliens, Abductions, and the UFO Obsession" (Jim Schnabel, 1994, Hamish Hamilton) the author briefly describes the case of an Australian woman who experienced an abduction while her friends observed her having an epileptic fit.
Perhaps alien abduction claims without corroborating evidence aren't considered newsworthy by major news providers anymore.
Edited to add
Abductions etc have already been done to death; they are now the stuff of parody.
...might be putting it more succinctly.
Claims (and the claims of those like Bud Hopkins, John Mack who promoted abduction accounts as reliable evidence of real events) might have peaked with Stuart Appelle's
questionable (IMHO) 1996 survey result that 5 - 6% of the US population claim to have been abducted by aliens (Wikipedia, Alien abduction, link above).
*Off-topic, but I think it's of interest that human-like (non-gray) UFOnauts and space visitors are so similar to modern terrestrial populations that they are described as having
ethnicities. Adamski's wise peaceful Venusians, Meier's racist Pleiadeans are often described as "Nordic".
Khoury's visitors are sort of "Scandinavian" and "Asian". Betty Hill thinks a Mongolian woman has features strikingly similar to her abductors.
Human-like aliens with features resembling those of people of African descent seem to be very rare. I'm guessing this might reflect the (perhaps subconscious) experiences, cultural influences and attitudes of claimants.
