Lloyd Canning admits he wasn't abducted by aliens six times, and says he made the claim to get exposure for his art. The Telegraph makes the Mirror look bad, people who didn't believe him before feel vindicated, people who did believe him feel stupid, the end.
Considering the social pressures against claiming contact with aliens, and the intellectual pressures against considering the subject, is it fair to privilege his retraction over his original statement? A retraction under duress is problematic, and holding a public claim of paranormal experience is almost always inherently stressful in English-speaking countries. As such, it might be better to say that he said he was abducted, then he said he wasn't, and leave it at that.
The media was inspired by a figure they believed in and then didn't. Splitting the difference between his first or second claim being the lie, maybe Lloyd Canning was in the same position. He believed he had been abducted by his muses, and then he didn't. As an artist he would want exposure either way.
It enters the record as another hoaxer because that's the easiest narrative, but the artistic process and paranormal phenomena are both strange enough to allow for something more complicated that neither artist nor media wants to consider for too long.
Or, he could be a lying hack artist, fed on by deluded hack writers. We'll never know.
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