Interest in paranormal as way to circumvent trauma

Some quick notes:

"I am arguing that alien-abduction memories are best understood as resulting in a blend of fantasy-proneness, memory distortion, culturally available scripts, sleep hallucinations, scientific illiteracy, aided and abetted by the suggestions and reinforcement of hypnotherapy. **But this analysis is still insufficient for an understanding of the phenomenon.** As the abductees themselves say, 'If you're telling me it didn't happen to me, that I made it up, why in God's name would I WANT to?'...But Donald Spence also argues that the validity of our conclusions–the HISTORICAL truth of our explanations–is irrelevant. The important question is: Do our beliefs have NARRATIVE truth? Do they provide us with meaning and value? When people believe they were abducted by aliens, does this help them to understand perplexing or upsetting aspects of their lives [finding a measure of similarity to PTSD victims]? If so, the explanation is going to be persuasive, satisfying, and resistant to argument [concluding these stories give them peace because of some relative knowledge of some cause, are transformative for their lives in giving them perspective, a worldview, orients them to the banality of living in relation to this world]." 

- Susan Clancy's author's intent from Abducted: How People Come To Believe They Were Kidnapped By Aliens, a book I find problematic in its approach to the phenomena but fascinating for the fact it was initially meant to be about sexual abuse victims' "recovered memories" but sexual abuse false memories seemed far more controversial to debunk than alien abductees who the public already has little sympathy for so she chose to explore her thesis through them instead. While kept as two different subjects here, I do think there's probably a huge overlap in people's propensity to believe in the paranormal and their desire to escape or distract from their situation or circumstances, which I'm obviously not immune to. As a form of trauma reassignment, it seems much "easier" if equally scary to refocus that energy and fear and curiosity and latent emotion onto something that is in a journey of "being discovered" rather than concrete things that have already "happened". Reading more about gnosticism, UFOs, the paranormal, I see a large similarity to the sort of distraction, exasperation, and processing work one undergoes coming to terms with trauma. The man who lives in fear after alien abduction and the man who's frustrated that nobody believes his Bigfoot sighting are fighting a similar internal battle. I'm reminded of Mysterious Skin where the trauma of child sexual abuse is easier to render in hindsight as alien abduction because it lends a mystery and recurrent, randomized element to something that was a concrete action of the past specifically enacted upon an individual.