Animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, aims to put visitors in the hot seat with their nationwide “Abduction” VR experience tour.

PETA’s Abduction bus landed at Texas A&M, stopping in the Rudder Plaza on Friday, March 31. According to a press release issued March 30, PETA’s mission behind the tour is to encourage empathy for animals who are mutilated and killed in university laboratories.

The experience was open to all visitors, who would enter a mysterious truck and put on a virtual reality headset.

“They’ll seemingly find themselves stranded in the desert with a couple of fellow humans, abducted by aliens, taken aboard a spaceship and subjected to a terrifying experience similar to what animals endure in laboratories,” PETA Media Coordinator Amanda Hays wrote in the press release. “They’ll watch as others are subjected to experiments — inspired by real tests done on animals — knowing that they’ll be next.”

Spring 2023 “Abduction” tour administrator Zach Claxton was on-site helping to administer the experience.

“We’re on a coast-to-coast tour basically abducting people in virtual reality as a metaphor for what goes on for animals in medical laboratories,” Claxton said.

According to Claxton, the two-month-long tour will travel across college campuses, visiting approximately two campuses a weekend. The spring 2023 tour has already boarded 500 abductees, Claxton said.

The goal of the VR experience is to help raise awareness among students about the mistreatment of animals that PETA claims is taking place at universities across the country, PETA Senior Director Rachelle Owens said in the press release.

“PETA is on a mission 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,” Owens said.