Basic Trope: Someone gets kidnapped by non-human beings from another world.
- Straight: Alice gets beamed up into a flying saucer by space aliens.
- Exaggerated:
- Many people are captured during an alien invasion of Earth.
- The entire planet gets sucked into a gigantic alien spacecraft.
- Downplayed: Alice is stopped and held up by aliens for a very brief time.
- Justified: Aliens are abducting humans for any of the possible reasons:
- To obtain test subjects for scientific experiments. This is usually the most common reason.
- To obtain potential mates for their cross-breeding program. This may be related to the above.
- To kill and obtain humans for their body parts, such as their meat as food.
- To take them as prisoners (of war), hostages, or slaves, not unlike what humans do to their captives.
- Or they actually had good intentions, such as peacefully sharing their knowledge and technology with us.
- Inverted:
- Alice is invited by aliens to visit their spaceship, and she accepts.
- An alien gets captured by human government agents, and is taken away to a secret military base.
- Subverted:
- It turns out that Alice's captors are actually humans.
- Alice is really just a liar; she made up that whole alien abduction tale to get attention from others.
- Alice wasn't really abducted by aliens; the whole experience was all just some sort of dream, hallucination, or even an elaborate hoax/prank that was played on her.
- Double Subverted:
- Parodied:
- The alien researchers are depicted as stereotypical hammy mad scientists.
- A lonely and desperate male alien, having no success with finding love on his planet, abducts Alice and tries to force her to date him. Naturally, she refuses to play along with his pathetic game.
- After having a drunken one-night-stand aboard an alien spaceship, Alice ends up giving birth to a half-alien baby. She tries to sue the father for child support in an intergalactic court.
- Aliens sell human meat for an intergalactic fast food restaurant chain. There are also aliens that refuse to eat human meat and protest against eating them.
- The slaves are forced to perform demeaning menial labor, such as scrubbing toilets.
- Alice worries about the possibility of getting anally probed by the aliens. Either the aliens are twisted perverts who are all too eager to do this, or they find this to be disgusting and deny having any such intentions.
- The aliens also beam up cows and other domestic animals as well.
- Zig-Zagged: Alice is kidnapped by aliens... except the story takes place on the aliens' home planet, which technically means that Alice is the alien in this situation.
- Averted: Nobody is abducted by aliens.
- Enforced: A story about alien abduction claims to be based on actual events, adapting the personal account of a real-life person who believes that this happened to them.
- Lampshaded:Alice: "So what are you space freaks going to do to me next? Please don't give me an anal probe."
- Invoked: Alice is tired of life on Earth, so she seeks out contact with beings from beyond the stars.
- Exploited: Alice takes some pictures from inside the ship in order to prove the existence of aliens and become famous.
- Defied: When aliens appear to try and take Alice to their spaceship, she fights off and/or flees from her would-be abductors.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed:
- Alice doesn't tell anyone about this story, for fear of being labelled as crazy or a liar.
- Turns out the actual abduction wasn't sanctioned by the aliens' superiors, who admonish them for treating Alice so poorly just because she isn't a member of their species, as well as poor scientific practice of having no control group.
- Reconstructed: Alice at least tells her family, who all believe her.
- Played For Laughs: The aliens have rather frivolous or ridiculous intentions in mind for their abductees; also see Parodied above.
- Played For Drama: Being kidnapped by strange, creepy, inhuman, and possibly dangerous beings would understandably terrify the victim. Even if the aliens don't actually harm them, the abductee may be sufficiently traumatized enough to suffer nightmares about this experience.
- Played For Horror:
- The aliens are depicted as inhumanly evil beings who perform cruel medical experiments on humans; which may result in disfigurement, mutation, death, or something worse.
- Alternatively, we never actually see or learn what exactly happens to the alien abductees, who just simply disappear and are never to be seen again.
- Implied: Alice has suddenly disappeared before or after a strange UFO sighting. When she returns, she is unable to remember what exactly happened to her, but feels certain that the reason was something very unusual...
Beam back up to Alien Abduction.
