This… this website is a joke, right? It’s got to be some kind of parody or something because it’s just too stupid to be real. I can’t remember how I came across this, but as you see there’s this website claiming that Autism is caused by real aliens from space abducting people for genetic experiments. And the evidence he has is that children sometimes draw Aliens (and obviously couldn’t be using their imaginations or influenced by pop culture in any way).

Full disclosure: I am Autistic. I was diagnosed in 2012 with a form of autism called Aspergers Syndrome which is considered a disability in the UK. And I was also once a child so naturally I’m intrigued by this. I would actually love it to be true that I’m part extra-terrestrial, but somehow I expect the evidence will be less than convincing.

‘The autism epidemic and alien abductions may be connected’. Yes. The connection is that neither of them are happening. Autism has always been fairly common and all that’s changed in the last few decades is people’s awareness as well as broadening the definition of Autism to include things that would previously have been called something else. Hell at one time, before the word autism was in anyone’s lexicon, Changelings were the explanation for children who were different (at least in Northern Europe).

Oh, and there’s a hat, because of course there’s a hat. See the real problem is that people stopped wearing hats – we need to bring hat wearing back into fashion then the Aliens will give up. But let’s look at these drawings:

I mean, yep, that’s a child’s drawing of the type of alien being prevalent in movies, TV shows, comics, video games, all over the internet. I used to do drawings like this. I also drew dinosaurs, fairies, dragons, although I don’t think I was abducted by any of those things. Maybe I’ve repressed the memory, but I’m sure someone would recall if a dragon swooped down and snatched me.

What comes across going through this site is that the author seems to not understand children at all, yet alone Autistic children. Here’s a bit from an interview with another UFOlogist talking about a nameless woman’s experience with a group of ‘hybrid’ children:

‘And she was asked “What’s a dog for?” And she said, “Well, you know,
it’s a companion”… The interesting thing here is
they’re not saying, “How do you elect a president?” “What do you do
Saturday night?” and things like that. They’re not interested in
politics, economics, culture, society.’  Sure – those things children are famously all into.

I guess the reason this bothers me is that, although I’m sure hardly anyone would ever believe this nonsense, it’s that, like with Changelings, labelling Autistic children as something ‘other’ enables people to not treat them as the human beings they are.