Why do Aliens drop you off in Bed?

A lot of the classic cases and anecdotes of Alien abductions end up with the Aliens dropping people off in their beds, or in the precise location where they were abducted.

Other cases, such as Travis Walton are notable because the Aliens drop the abductee off in another place, suspiciously close (or far) from where they claimed to be abducted. In the TW case he was taken to a town 30 miles away. Far enough for a hoaxer to 'hide', but not so far he couldn't get home.

This just seems really strange to me.

Certainly if we put a radio-collar on a bear, we try to drop him off near his den. But except in the case of juveniles or baby bears, we don't actually put them -in- the den (unless the bear is hibernating).

But why don't the Aliens just drop the abductee off where they happen to be? Or why not just drop them off in their front yard, or push them out of the craft over a lake? The Allagash abductees were reportedly beamed back on shore at their campsite. (How did the Aliens know that was their campsite? )

Betty and Barney's aliens dragged Barney back to the car. Many drivers who talk about abduction say they get 'beamed' back into their car.

To me, this fact seems to add credence to the idea that abductions are an 'internal' or 'subjective' phenomenon.

Certainly it doesn't mean it wasn't real to the experiencer.

It may imply that abductions are done 'virtually'. But in cases where the experiencers were probed or tested, it seems necessary to have the physical body present.

Obviously if the Aliens use a 'beam' they could just reverse the co-ordinates. But all too often we hear of them dropping the experiencer in their own bed. This just seems hard to understand, if not a little silly.

Sure the Aliens may not want people to detect their abductions, but that's what memory wipes are for, right?

The other odd thing related to this is that their memory wipes appear to all be impermanent or faulty - the experiencers eventually recall or with simple hypnosis, recall it. You'd think a memory wipe would be permanent. Either they don't really want us to forget, or their equipment need calibration, istm.

Thoughts?

Good points. Starred. As we know with animal tagging, if you're not careful you can traumatize the animal to the point where you can cause their death. We use a towel to wrap their eyes and release them as non-traumatically as possible.

If they are truly trying to 'study' the human species, it makes sense not to 'disturb' the subject and thus pervert their natural behavior.

On the poster who suggested a Galactic norm for abductees, that's also interesting, but that would mean failing to put the subject back in the precise location would have repercussions. So while a fairly elegant solution, it seems dubious. One might say 'well some aliens follow the treaty and some don't.' Hmm, even harder to buy; it would be unusual to make treaties that aren't strictly followed/enforced, or to enact them for 'convenience'.

It still doesn't really explain why the Aliens care about their subjects after they get their data. Remember, too, that there have been thousands and thousands, even millions of reported abductions. At some point you'd expect them to get careless and drop convention. In fact, there seem to be too many aductions, even if only a fraction of those reported are real.

In a way, those cases where they -don't- put the subjects back in the precise location seem less believable. There's no good reason to drop someone off 30 miles away. It does't really explain cases when people are dragged back to their car, while some are 'beamed'.

Thanks for the replies!

Well scientifically and medically you may be incorrect. People with short term amnesia exist and they have no short term storage or their short term storage gets wiped and written over minute by minute.

One girl had an injury as a youngster and if she's sitting in a restaurant and doesn't make a note, if she goes to the ladies room and comes back, she forgets where she was sitting and has had to leave and go elsewhere.

So, assuming 'Aliens' understand enough about human physiology to tamper with memory and are not just dropping people on their heads and hoping for the best, they are certainly able to wipe recent memory completely, even considering that the brain may write to a number of areas, or that the model may be holographic.

Accident victims experience that too.

Memory is multi-faceted. There's a process of encoding, storage and then retrieval.

There's sensory memory, short-term memory, and long term memory.

There's also memory inhibition. If you're looking for your car in a garage you don't want to retrieve every memory of everywhere you've ever parked. You just want the one.

Like I said, for an Alien (apparently) needing a robust system of memory denial or memory wiping, what good is it to field a system that is ineffective? How naive were Betty Hill's aliens who claimed to be able to wipe a memory only to find that she not only retrieved it (allegedly) with hypnosis, but dreamed of it, also?

If you ask any UFO fan, they'll tell you that hypnosis will retrieve abduction and missing time memories. Well if 'Aliens' have been studying us for hundreds of years and abducting hundreds every week/month, they must know this also. So, why bother?

Or, maybe it's a subjective phenomenon and we don't have actual, physical aliens and abduction memories are suspect. It's hard to know which, isn't it?

Short abductions seem to return to the point of origin. To me this might indicate that whatever "machine" does the beaming/floating is just left running and then used to float the person back.

Cases like Travis Walton, which are longer abductions might mean the machine was turned off and the exam area (ship?) moved some distance in that time.