Chilling Virtual Reality Experience From peta2 Promises Alien Encounters at CU Boulder

For Immediate Release:
March 17, 2025

Contact:
Brandi Pharris 202-483-7382

Coming to the University of Colorado Boulder this week is peta2’s award-winning virtual reality experience, Abduction, which is touring the country to encourage empathy for animals caged in laboratories on university campuses.

In this eerie experience, visitors will enter a mysterious truck containing a mobile virtual reality studio and find themselves seemingly stranded with a couple of fellow humans in the desert, only to be abducted by aliens, taken aboard a spaceship, and subjected to a shocking experience 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:       Monday,March 17 – Thursday, March 20, 11 a.m.–5 p.m. each day

Where:     Student Commons room on the 2nd floor of the Wolf Law Building,

2450 Kittredge Loop Road, Boulder

Watch the trailer here. Broadcast-quality footage of the Abduction virtual reality experience is available upon request.

At the University of Colorado Boulder, experimenters isolated rats in boxes with electrified floors and repeatedly shocked their feet—among other cruelties—to induce “fear learning.” Other rats in a “stress training” experiment endured 100 tail shocks at 60-second intervals until they learned to turn a wheel a set number of times to stop the shocks. They were also forced to pull ropes attached to heavy weights for food. Experimenters also surgically induced spinal cord injuries in mice. One mouse died during surgery, while others experienced extreme weight loss or deteriorating health. Some mice even chewed off their own limbs, a behavior known as “autotomy,” caused by severe nerve damage and loss of sensation.

“Many students don’t know that on their own college campuses, frightened and confused animals are psychologically tormented, mutilated, and killed in laboratories with no way to escape or even understand what’s happening to them,” says PETA’s Associate Director of Innovation and Execution Kenneth Montville. “peta2 is a trailblazer in using immersive VR experiences to open young people’s eyes to this cruelty, help them understand what it feels like, and motivate them to join our call for a switch to superior, non-animal research.”

Studies show that 90% of all basic research—most of which involves animals—fails to lead to treatments for humans. That’s why peta2 is pushing universities to prove their supposed commitments to “replacing, reducing, and refining” the use of animals in experiments.

Since its debut, Abduction has traveled from coast to coast, visiting more than 50 colleges and universities, including Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California–Los Angeles, and the University of Texas at Austin. 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.