Chilling Virtual Reality Experience From peta2 Promises Alien Encounters at University of South Alabama
For Immediate Release:
September 26, 2025
Contact:
Sara Groves 202-483-7382
Coming to the University of South Alabama next 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, September 29 – October 2, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m. each day
Where: Outside the Humanities Building at the University of South Alabama, 5991 USA Drive North, Mobile
Watch the trailer here. Broadcast-quality footage of the Abduction virtual reality experience is available upon request.
At the University of South Alabama, experimenters injected mice with severe, disease-inducing doses of the flu virus and denied them treatment for two weeks, resulting in some of the animals losing over 20% of their body weight before experimenters killed them. In another experiment, experimenters placed mice in a brightly lit cage containing a dark box at one end—knowing that mice typically avoid bright light—and delivered painful foot shocks whenever the mice attempted to hide in the box. And in another experiment, experimenters injected mice with drugs and subjected them to invasive rectal probes seven times over two and a half hours, purportedly to study nausea—despite admitting that assessing nausea in mice is difficult because they are unable to vomit.
“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 peta2 Vice President Rachelle Owen. “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 invest in research relevant to humans through Research Modernization NOW, a roadmap to better science.
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.
