Alien Encounters Coming to University of South Florida, Courtesy of Eerie VR Experience From peta2

For Immediate Release:
April 13, 2026

Contact:
Sara Groves 202-483-7382

Close encounters of an eye-opening kind will await students at the University of South Florida (USF) this week, when peta2—part of PETA’s youth division—lands on campus with its award-winning virtual reality experience, Abduction, as part of a nationwide tour to encourage empathy for animals caged and tormented in university laboratories.

Visitors to the chilling experience will enter a mysterious truck containing a mobile virtual reality studio and find themselves seemingly stranded in the desert with a couple of fellow humans, only to be abducted by aliens, taken aboard a spaceship, and subjected to a terrifying scenario that mirrors what other species endure in laboratories. They’ll watch as their friends are subjected to painful tests—knowing that they’ll be next.

When:      Tuesday, April 14 – Thursday, April 16, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m. each day

Where:     Outside USF’s Theatre Centre, 3837 USF Holly Drive TAR 230, Tampa

Watch the trailer here.

Studies show that 90% of all basic research—most of which involves animals—fails to lead to treatments for humans. Yet at the University of South Florida, experimenters fed mice varying levels of salt, injected dye into their eyes while conscious, surgically implanted blood pressure devices inside their small bodies, and repeatedly drew blood from their eyes, inducing traumatic hemorrhagic shock, before all of them were killed by having their necks broken. Other USF experimenters are triggering seizures in rats without analgesics, slicing open their abdomens to implant a recording device and battery, inserting wires that run along their backs and necks, and restraining them while experimenters drill into their skulls.

“The nightmare illusion of being used as an unwilling test subject eventually ends for students visiting Abduction, but the terrified animals who are tormented and killed in laboratories on campus have no escape,” says peta2 Vice President Rachelle Owen. “peta2’s immersive VR experience is opening students’ eyes to the horrors of animal experimentation and empowering them to demand a shift toward state-of-the-art, animal‑free research methods.”

Since its debut, Abduction has traveled from coast to coast, visiting nearly 100 colleges and universities, including Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California–Los Angeles, and the University of Texas at Austin. Students have hailed Abduction as “a really effective way of getting the message across” and said that it opened their eyes to the cruelty of experiments on animals, with one student saying, “I gotta go find the labs on this campus … I can’t believe they’re doing these things here.”

Abduction was filmed in VR180 with assistance from the immersive content creation studio Prosper XR, won “Gold” and “Audience” honors in the 2023 Shorty Impact Awards, and was a nominee for the 2024 Webby Awards.

peta2—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers young people positive, empowering actions to help animals. For more information, please visit peta2.com or follow peta2 on TikTok or Instagram.