Most survival guides are written by the insane or people so much more awesome than the reader their expectations are insane. For instance, I have two books that swear the best way to jump out of a 5th floor window is to do half a front flip and aim for a dumpster. I have 700 books that swear poking tiny pressure points is the best way to defeat an attacking madman. And I have one book explaining how to use a sock to squeeze drinkable water out of animal poop. The point is, survival books are a fun way to fantasize about yourself kicking total ass if something terrible happens to you. I’m not saying you’re wrong, unlikely Rambo; I only brought it up because it’s unusually not so with this book. The Alien Abduction Survival Guide is exclusively for pussies looking for ways to make things easier on their space kidnappers.
First off, this book isn’t a joke. Or if it is, it’s a conspiracy to commit an unfunny prank lasting decades. Michelle LaVigne spends most of her nights in space, yanked there against her will by her best friends who have also tortured her for years. It’s easy to dismiss Michelle as a lunatic or a grifter, but it’s more accurate to say she has every possible emotional and sleep disorder and her only treatment has been blaming space. If you look at this book as a work of fiction, and come the fuck on if you don’t, she has the world building skills of a child saying, “The couch is a racecar and I’m Batman, and you’re Batman. We’re cats.”
It starts off simple enough. Michelle has been abducted since childhood by gray aliens. Hey, maybe you know her gray alien mentor? Hetar? Thin? From outer space? She drew a picture of him if you’re having trouble placing the name.
“You may know him; you may not.” That’s the closest thing Michelle has to keeping a foot planted in reality– being open to the possibility you DON’T know her childhood alien kidnapper. It’s the last almost sane line of the book, and we’re on page 4.
Maybe the most important thing to mention about The Alien Abduction Survival Guide, is there’s not a goddamn thing to “survive.” The worst thing Michelle ever saw in space was someone getting burned during a starship rampage, and the aliens immediately healed him with mind rays. From everything she says, these grays are kind creatures she just baaaarely doesn’t call “dad,” and they put you back right where they found you after some harmless nude experiments. You know what? Maybe the most important thing to mention about The Alien Abduction Survival Guide is how everyone is naked.
Aliens sometimes place prisoners, nudely, into rooms with other humans while they wait to be experiments. Michelle was given a job as an “empath” where she uses her emotion super powers to replace fear and anger in the other prisoners with warm, safe feelings. She thinks this reflects well on her, but this is like telling the rest of the slave ship to relax and enjoy the shade. Michelle is a human Judas cow.
I don’t know if Michelle’s artist is a 6-year-old she met in the stars or if she did the illustrations herself, but they don’t exactly lend credibility to her stories. There are any number of ways she could have recorded proof of her abductions and all she has to back up her story is a child’s drawing of these two, I don’t know, sea monkeys? Filming a porno on a stick of butter with The Unabomber?
Most of Michelle’s book is made up of the kind of vague stories told by frequent liars…. lazy descriptions of how “all abductees” do things or how she’s “even seen some abductees” do other things. She has a deliberate lack of specifics like someone who had sex outside once and “could tell some pretty wild stories” or a guy who got punched in fourth grade and “grew up fighting.” Or maybe like Bill Cosby’s cellmate saying “I have Hollywood connections,” except with Michelle, there’s no scrap of truth from which to exaggerate. I’m not saying she’s lying because space monsters don’t exist. I’m saying she’s lying because she talks like a liar and isn’t smart enough to keep her stories straight. Even if Michelle has been taken into space, she’s still absolutely full of shit.
And while most of her anecdotes are hazy, there is one with actual details. She was sent in to comfort a hostile abductee, which she illustrated with what a chimpanzee might draw if their Pictionary clue was “nude American Idol.” (See Figure 4.) This means in her wildest imagination, Michelle is an Earth quisling working for the aliens to keep her fellow humans in line.
She told him the comforting fact, “You won’t even remember this when you wake up,” and “They’ll take you straight home after.” She doesn’t explain after what, but let’s not play games– creatures don’t steal you from your bed and erase your memory if they’re asking you to taste test potato chips. Michelle fails to calm him down because in her wildest imagination she is an unsuccessful volunteer kidnapper assistant.
The man goes nuts and the aliens stun ray him. He keeps fighting, and they have to stun him again, eventually dragging him only partially stunned into a mysterious room while he curses right at Michelle’s face. She explains to the reader how she felt bad because she promised him he’d be going home. Which means, in her wildest imagination, she met a brave hero immune to the alien stun rays and immediately betrayed him to gain favor with her captors. This is like lying that you were at 9/11, only to say you called the first responders gay and dropped an ice cream cone then selling it as HOW TO SURVIVE 9/11 EVERY TIME.
In the same book where men are dragged against their will to torture chambers, this lonely dingbat talks about how magical and loving the aliens are. “Come dance with me,” Hetar says to the children in Figure 6. And if the kids listen closely they can hear the man from Figure 4 shrieking, “I’ll fucking! AIIIEEE! Kill you for this, you traitorous bitch!” as his anus is harvested.
Not all of Michelle’s survival guide is devoted to pleasing your captors. She also has some tips for staying safe online from cyberbullies and fraudulent UFO researchers. For instance, one issue that has “effected” her is how people go online and pretend to be alien researchers but they’re only joking. You’d think it would be obvious, but some people are so ignorant they can’t tell the difference between dumb fucking idiots making up alien stories for attention and dumb fucking idiots making alien stories up for attention.
Michelle doesn’t just suggest pacifism and Uncle Tommery for abductees trapped in space. She thinks you should let the aliens have their way with you while you’re still in your home. She tells a story about her husband, who used to keep a wooden board by the bed to bash aliens until he almost used it to cave in the head of their four-year-old. Of all the anecdotes in her book, this one where no aliens showed up and her daughter almost got killed by her and her husband’s shared paranoia seems the truest.
If I’m being honest, I think hitting an alien intruder in the head with a stick is a pretty good idea and making sure the alien is not your daughter first requires a pretty basic level of stick expertise. More to the point I’m trying to make, fuck you, alien sympathizer. Step zero in surviving an alien abduction is at least trying to cave in their bitch ass moon heads while they’re beaming into your bedroom. What’s your other advice, Michelle? Establishing a relationship with the creatures and saying “Not tonight, please,” on occasion?
Holy shit, she really did suggest establishing a relationship with the creatures and saying, “Not tonight, please,” on occasion. Michelle claims this assertiveness and intelligence(?) will earn their respect! She thinks she’s very smart and tough for requesting a night off from her job as a naked space coward! Well, if Hetar is impressed by some collaborator sheepishly asking permission to not be abducted, he’s going to really think it’s something when I blast his grinning head off with a stick.
For most of the book, Michelle paints a picture of benevolent creatures who are super cool once you surrender to them completely. She wants you to know how lucky and special she is for Hetar choosing her. But like most attention whore liars, she’d like more attention and different kinds of it, so sometimes the aliens are very bad and you see how brave she is for enduring such hardship. Aliens who dance with children gave this woman a job telling nude men to calm down, and her best friend is a being named Hetar, who you may have met, but here she is complaining about how no one understands the sleepless fear she feels when reliving her abductions. Michelle may not have heard this phrase since she spends most of her time off planet, but pick a lane, you bottomless dumbshit.
You’re probably thinking, “These are balls-naked, easily tricked people surrounded by creatures who do not understand the difference between compassion and involuntary butthole research. There’s some weird sex stuff going on, isn’t there?” I’m happy to answer “Yes.” Very much so, “yes.”
Michelle lists several models of mind wands that give you “fantasies of pleasure or even an orgasm.” So they’re star dildos, but she goes on to explain how they’re also phaser weapons, which has got to be the single most common cause of space death. Even the most incomprehensible civilization would look at death and squirting and think, “Let’s make these two separate beams.”
Michelle talks about a “discovery room” which teaches you things about who you are. Things that would be “shameful” if done in front of others. Things you can’t be judged for because anything goes in the discovery room. And I wouldn’t consider this judgement, but I’m troubled by what sex kinks a woman finds shameful when she’s not embarrassed by putting her name on an alien survival book that’s nothing more than instructions on opening your asshole and saying “thank you, space.”
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This article was brought to you by our fine patron and Hot Dog Supreme, Armando Nava: whose name is an anagram of how they were conceived: a rad van moan.