In the most extravagant accounts of alien abductions, the victims are wafted from their bedrooms through the walls of their houses--not through the open windows but through the solid walls--to the waiting spacecraft, and later returned, again through the walls. This had long struck me as so preposterous as to refute alien-abduction claims wholesale.
Some years ago I asked my colleague David Jacobs (he of Secret Life: Firsthand Documented Accounts of UFO Abductions and The Threat) how he supposed the aliens accomplished this feat. To the best of my recollection, he acknowledged that he had no idea how they did it, and he didn't offer any hypotheses; but he believed it because it turned up with such frequency in the (hypnotically induced) reports by abductees--which, after all, was virtually all the evidence he had for the abductions themselves. He was certainly in no position to accept some parts of the abduction reports as factual and to reject some of the most common parts as fiction. I told him then what I believed for years: that this one alleged phenomenon proved to my satisfaction that there were no alien abductions.
I don't keep up with the alien-abduction literature, so I don't know whether David or anyone else has attempted a naturalistic explanation of wall-wafting. But I have a simple hypothesis to account for it, which I have been keeping to myself for fear either that the Believers might appropriate it to enhance their credibility, or that CSICOP would demand that I return my membership card. (It would help if you have read the Rev. Edwin Abbott Abbott's Flatland--A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884).)
Imagine that you live in (on?) a spatially two-dimensional world--e.g., on the perfectly flat surface of a very large table--and, of course, that you are also spatially two-dimensional, as is everything else in your world. (Well, there could be one-dimensional--i.e., minimally two-dimensional--things in your world. But no three-or-more-dimensional things.) Imagine as well that you are (perhaps psychically or even somehow sensibly) aware of things inhabiting and events transpiring in your two-dimensional world. But of course you have no access to any worlds but your own.
Further, suppose there is this shape:
in your world, and you want to remove the triangle from inside. Fine.
You move around to the open "window", go in, grab the triangle, and
leave. But suppose there is this shape: 
in your world, with a triangle inside. If you're on the outside,
there's no way that you can get in; you're blocked everywhere by a
solid "wall".But those of us who live in the three-dimensional world in which your two-dimensional world is embedded can easily get in and out of it: we reach "over" the wall in our third dimension, pluck out the triangle, and set it down outside the wall in your two-dimensional world . All you can say is that a miracle has occurred: somehow the triangle went right through the solid wall. We could put it back in again just as easily--and miraculously. (We could also pick up a two-dimensional right-hand glove, turn it over in our third dimension, and put it down again. That very same glove would have become a left-hand glove in your world.) If any part of our three-dimensional body passed into (i.e., through) the two-dimensional world, what would "appear" in that world would be a two-dimensional cross-section of that body part.
We ourselves are spatially three-dimensional creatures living in what we experience as a three-dimensional world. But it is entirely possible that our three-dimensional world is embedded in a spatially four- (or higher-) dimensional world. We would normally be quite unaware of this fact, though we might come to suspect it if certain phenomena occurred. In particular, we might come to suspect it if solid objects seemed to pass miraculously through solid objects. Or if a right-hand glove briefly disappeared and returned as a left-hand glove.
On this kind of account, the alien takes the abductee out of the familiar three-dimensional house into a four-dimensional world to which we have no access. They could return promptly to the outside of the house, or linger beyond our three-dimensional reach for as long as they wanted, returning when it pleased them to do so. (On this view, the alien that we see is not the whole thing, but just a three-dimensional "cross-section" of a spatially four- (or more-) dimensional creature.)
I personally have not a shred of evidence that this sort of thing is going on. But if people regularly pass through solid walls, particularly in the company of strange creatures, the present account seems to provide the simplest hypothesis to explain the strange phenomena.
Copyright © 2003, William A. Wisdom