Stuart Appelle

Stuart Appelle (April 3, 1946 – June 27, 2011) was an American experimental psychologist best known, outside his main field, for a sustained and critical study of alien-abduction research. He is a useful figure in the ufology literature because he was an insider to mainstream psychology who took the reports seriously enough to test the explanations offered for them, and who concluded that those explanations were not yet adequate.

Academic career

Appelle received his Ph.D. from George Washington University in 1972. His research centred on visual and tactual perception, particularly object orientation, and he is credited in perception texts with the "oblique effect" concept. He taught at the State University of New York College at Brockport for most of his career, chaired its Department of Psychology, and later served as Dean of the School of Letters and Sciences. He also held teaching or research posts at George Washington University, Mount Vernon College, and the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. He belonged to nine professional bodies, including the American Psychological Association, and presented at more than twenty professional meetings.

Work on UFOs and abductions

His interest in anomalous experience began early. He started studying UFO sightings in 1972 while still a graduate student, and criticised a sociological explanation of UFO belief based on "status inconsistency." His serious involvement came in the late 1980s, when abduction reports had become a major public and professional controversy. Appelle served for about twenty years on the board of the Center for UFO Studies and was a regular contributor to the Journal of UFO Studies.

His best-known abduction paper, "The Abduction Experience: A Critical Evaluation of Theory and Evidence" (Journal of UFO Studies, new series vol. 6, 1995/96, pp. 29–78), reviewed the main explanations in turn: hypnotic suggestion, false memory, fantasy-proneness, sleep anomalies, and deliberate deception. For each he identified what the evidence supported and where it fell short. The paper is often cited for its catalogue of explanations rather than for a single answer. A later chapter with Steven Lynn and Leonard Newman, "Alien Abduction Experiences," appeared in Varieties of Anomalous Experience (American Psychological Association, 2000). Its co-authors were both prominent sceptics of abduction claims, and the chapter reported that abductees, as a group, did not differ from the general population on clinical measures of psychopathology.

Position and reception

Appelle's position was distinctive and sometimes uncomfortable for both camps. He agreed with skeptics that the speculative psychological explanations then on offer were thinly supported. He also argued that conventional accounts, including suggestibility and false memory, did not yet explain the abduction reports, and he called for research that treated the experiences as a phenomenon worth serious study. His work asked what the evidence could bear rather than offering a single verdict, which is why it is cited in discussions of abduction research more than in the popular literature.

The main weakness in the record is the limited direct evidence for his own claims. Most of his UFO work appeared in a small specialist journal, and the reviews of his work that exist are largely by other researchers in the field. His obituary in the Journal of Scientific Exploration (2012) was written by a fellow researcher and is sympathetic, so it should be read alongside the primary papers.

Legacy

Appelle died in Brighton, New York, in 2011. He is remembered as a mainstream academic who applied ordinary experimental standards to a field often dominated by advocates or by dismissive critics. His 1995/96 paper remains a standard reference in discussions of abduction research, and it is cited in general reviews of the phenomenon, including the Wikipedia article on alien abduction.