Roughly 100 alien abduction cases spanning over the past 30 years are set to be investigated by scientists with hopes of unraveling the mysterious experiences. Researchers at Rice University in Texas plan to analyze a trove of archives consisting of thousands of documents in the form of books, journals, photographs, slides, reports, meeting notes and letters. The cases include the famous story of Betty and Barney Hill, a New Hampshire couple who say they were abducted in 1961 while driving up a mountain. Other cases include one that inspired a new Netflix show - the Pascagoula abduction. The'Archive of the Impossible' at Rice University plays host to material from Jacques Vallee (whose work inspired Steven Spielberg's'Close Encounters of the Third Kind') and author Whitley Streiber, who claimed to have been abducted by aliens in his 1987 book Communion among hundreds of other abduction stories.

Accounts of mysterious flashing lights in the sky, spacecrafts and encounters with'real' aliens reflect high levels of public interest in UFOs and the belief that there is'something out there'. However, many psychologists are less convinced, and think they can provide more down-to-earth, scientific explanations. Belief in aliens has increased steadily since the birth of modern alien research in the 1940s and 1950s, following the news surrounding a classified US military project at Roswell Air Force Base, New Mexico. The theory that alien abductions are hoaxes may be true in a few cases, but there is no reason to assume that the majority of'experiencers' are frauds Surveys in Western cultures estimated belief in aliens to be as high as 50% in 2015. And despite the fact that it is considered rare, a significant number of people also believe they have experienced alien abduction.