Anal Probes and Aliens: Why So Many People Fell for a Joke Story
The response to a recent satirical news article highlights the power of source confusion.
Posted June 2, 2025 | Reviewed by Devon Frye
A remarkable post on Instagram and Facebook in April, 2025, was something of an eye catcher: “Texas man admits kidnapping people to anally probe them while disguised as an alien.”
Accompanied by a picture of an older man, the post explained that this individual, a retired trucker, confessed to 79 kidnappings in the American West over a period of 40 years. He also confessed to using psychoactive drugs to subdue his victims, and to “assaulting" them in various bodily cavities, manually and with a variety of odd devices which he apparently designed and manufactured himself.
Alleged victims included UFO investigators who were found in the vicinity of Area 51 in Nevada and Roswell in New Mexico. Details of his arrest and of the legal charges against him were also provided.
The problem, of course, is that none of this ever happened. This was a joke article published by the World News Daily Report, a fairly well-known producer of fictional satirical content. The story was a complete fabrication, created for laughs, and it was presumably intended to be taken as such.
The other problem, however, was that a lot of people apparently took it seriously. Some of these people worked for various fact-checking and debunking sites, and they gave the story a significant level of investigative attention . It was shown, for example, that the photograph which accompanied the article was actually a mug shot from a 2011 blog post, which in fact had nothing to do with the article. Some zealous fact checkers even followed up to the point that they could assert that neither the El Paso Sheriff's Office, El Paso Police, nor the FBI had actually fulfilled the law enforcement roles alleged in the anal probe case in question.
One might wonder why anybody would take the time to debunk something this bizarre, until you realize that you can still find this incredible story, without any doubts attached, on Internet sources, and that at least 6,000 people “liked” the post initially. How many of them found it amusing, as opposed to how many of them actually believed it, is entirely open to question. However, some of the initial public comments on the original version of this post, no longer readily available in the original Internet sources, at least appeared to bear a somewhat unsettling level of credulity.
Why Aliens Are Everywhere: Understanding the Availability Heuristic
Part of the early willingness to entertain this as a serious article may have had to do with the availability heuristic : our tendency to make judgments based on the relative availability of relevant examples. Why on Earth, for example, would anybody believe that this guy would actually disguise himself as a space alien?
Within living memory , the consideration of space aliens and related topics was largely confined to the realm of science fiction or fringe realms of thought. However, today things are different.
Today, there are many popular media programs regularly asserting firm beliefs in alien spacecraft and the space aliens who love them. Even the U.S. Government has gotten into the act, seriously entertaining and widely publicizing alleged encounters between spacecraft, alien “biologics,” a variety of secret agents, and the occasional fighter plane.
As a result of all this coverage, we now have space aliens regularly staring us in the face, not as the creation of science fiction authors but as a putative palpable reality. Space aliens are now all over the place. So he disguised himself as an alien—sure, why not?
The Critical Role of Source Confusion
Yet a more powerful psychological influence here might lie in the realm of source confusion (see Sharps, 2024).
Much research demonstrates that we human beings are not particularly good, on average, at remembering the sources of information, at recalling when or where we heard this or that. This results from the relatively limited cognitive resources we typically devote to source monitoring— it's generally more important for us to remember items and topics than the place or time we first encountered them.
Many studies have demonstrated the influence and importance of source monitoring and source confusion. Among these are the excellent early experiments of Sulin and Dooling (1974; expanded in Dooling and Christiannsen, 1977). An important finding of this research derived from the use of paragraphs about well-known people from opposite ends of the moral spectrum, Helen Keller and Adolf Hitler.
These paragraphs about their lives were either presented with their names in situ, or with the names “Carol Harris” or “Gerald Martin” substituted respectively. Respondents read these paragraphs and were then confronted with stimulus items which included statements that were thematically appropriate for Hitler or Keller, but which were not in fact present in the initial paragraphs. Respondents tended inaccurately to recognize these statements as having been present in the paragraphs when the names Hitler or Keller were used, but not when the names Harris or Martin were substituted.
In other words, respondents remembered facts from their general knowledge about Hitler or Keller as having been present in the relevant paragraphs, when in fact they were not; the use of the infamous or famous name resulted in recall of the thematic nature and contextual appropriateness of the given statement, but not in accurate recall of its source , its provenance in the respondent’s general knowledge or in the experimental paragraphs themselves. Human beings might therefore readily recall a joke article as a real news item.
Source Confusion in a Confusing World
In the modern world, a plethora of Internet sources, legitimate, illegitimate, and completely ridiculous, compete for our attention, and dozens of ”news” offerings in the media may or may not have anything to do with concrete reality. Myriad sources of information and complete nonsense babble to us day and night through a vast horde of electronic systems and devices. It might therefore behoove us in the modern world to pay more attention to the psychological issues of informational availability and source confusion.
Such psychological awareness might at least help us to avoid fleeing in panic before nonexistent aliens, alien imitators, and their completely illusory probes.
Dooling, D. J., & Christiaansen, R. E. (1977). Episodic and Semantic Aspects of Memory for Prose. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 3 , 428–436.
Sharps, M.J. (2024). The Forensic View: Investigative Psychology, Law Enforcement, Space Aliens, Exploration, and the Nature of Madness . Amazon.
Sulin, R. A., & Dooling, D. J. (1974). Intrusion of a Thematic Idea in Retention of Prose. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 103 , 255–262.
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Matthew Sharps, Ph.D., professor of psychology at California State University, Fresno. He researches forensic cognitive science among other related areas.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.