Abduction researcher Budd Hopkins has some good articles debunking the debunkings here:
http://www.intrudersfoundation.org/if_readings.html (I just read the articles I discuss below this morning *after* posting my responses to Ruth, BTW, so those responses weren't influenced by what Hopkins or, later, Jacobs says.) In Part 1 of a four-part article called "Patterns of UFO Abductions," Hopkins notes that of all the reports he's aware of (thousands, including those he elicited himself), the vast majority of which involve the abductee being "examined" by the "aliens" while naked, none of the accounts mention embarrassment at being naked. In Part 2, he writes: "In these hundreds upon hundreds of UFO abduction accounts, I have yet to hear anyone state that the UFO occupants paid the slightest attention to an abductee's heart during the physical examination procedures that routinely occur during these encounters. The aliens' interest is almost invariably focused upon the abductee's genitals and lower abdomen. There are frequent additional 'operations' involving the abductee's head, and in particular the nasal cavity, the eyes and ears. We also occasionally hear of procedures having to do with the feet, the major joints and the rectum. But never, ever, the abductee's heart." If that's true, and if all these reports are "false memories," it's quite remarkable. In Part 3, he notes that none of the abduction accounts he's aware of feature food and drink, even peripherally. He points out that fantasizing normally involves at least some elements of real life, especially of very common and important human activities. Again, the absence from the reports of any references to eating and drinking, if accurate, is astonishing if we assume they're all fantasies or false memories. Finally, in Part 4, he notes the almost complete absence from any of the reports (including several from police officers) of the "aliens" wielding weapons of any kind. Especially given the forced-abduction scenario described in these reports, if they're all fantasies or false memories, this absence, if accurate, is startling. In other words, if the accounts are just fantasies or false memories, in accord with the standard patterns of fantasy, one or another of these elements should be present in a significant percentage of the accounts. Hopkins believes the accounts are of real live aliens, and that these absent features support that notion. As I've said, I doubt the premise of alien beings. But at the very least, the absences indicate that there is something about abduction accounts that is qualitatively different from ordinary fantasizing, false memories, or even hallucinations. They're just not the same phenomenon. Hopkins's "Response to the ABC Peter Jennings 'Seeing Is Believing'" TV program is also of interest. He takes direct aim at the "sleep paralysis" explanation for abduction accounts. He was interviewed for the program and made the same points I'm about to list, but none of them made it into the finished documentary, which proposed sleep paralysis as *the* explanation for abduction reports: --For the first 20 years of his research into abduction reports, none of the experiences took place while the subject was in bed asleep (or half-awake); they all involved "abductions" while the subject was engaging in routine daily activity. --In a number of cases, several people were "taken" at the same time, and the "abductees" afterward reported identical details. --He also cites some apparent physical evidence, such as new but healed scars. --Of the abduction reports he's aware of, some 30 percent were not obtained via hypnosis. (I haven't read the other articles linked to on this page.) Another site I looked at this morning-- http://www.ufoabduction.com/research.htm --has some interesting material. David Jacobs, the abduction researcher who runs the site--rather grandly called the International Center for Abduction Research--reviews Susan Clancy's book "Abducted." (Clancy is one of the authors of the "Memory Distortion" study Ruth cited.) It's an openly hostile review, but many of the points it makes about Clancy's not having engaged with the evidence are significant. He also has a critique of the Jennings ABC special, making points similar to those of Budd Hopkins (they're colleagues, so that's not surprising). He says, flatly, "It must be understood that all debunkers commit one or more of three errors: 1, they do not know the data, 2, they ignore the data or 3, they distort the data to make it conform to their explanations. There are no exceptions to this rule." He also has a multipart article titled "Thinking Clearly About the Abduction Phenomenon" that I plan to read later today, if I can manage it. Finally, he has a page addressed "To Therapists": http://www.ufoabduction.com/therapists.htm At the end, he writes: "If you would like to contribute to the investigation of abductions using agenda-free investigative and therapeutic strategies, I will send you an e-mail packet of information about techniques of hypnosis, protocols of investigation, proper questioning procedures, and problems in therapy. If you are serious and would like to become more active, please send me your vita and a request for information. Label the subject line 'Therapist Info.'" Ruth, don't know whether your vita would qualify you in his eyes to receive this information, but it would probably be interesting material if you could get your hands on it. He's currently writing a book, says his bio, about the use of hypnosis in abduction research. In a review of Jacobs's most recent book, "The Threat," the reviewer writes that it contains "the most substantial discussion I've yet seen in print from any abduction researcher about the methodology of abduction research. How do we know that abductees aren't simply suffering from dissasociative fantasies? How do we know they aren't prompted under hypnosis with leading questions, or that they're not confabulating? ("Confabulation" is a technical term that means, very simply, "making things up.") Skeptics, of course, have made these charges, and Jacobs answers them and others, in great detail. Are abduction stories caused by media contamination? If they were, says Jacobs, he would be getting reports of the dancing fat blue aliens in the film of Whitley Strieber's Communion, and he never has. Are abduction reports an example of false memory syndrome? No, says Jacobs, because, unlike people with this syndrome -- who believe in sexual abuse that never happened -- abductees consciously remember their abductions without being prompted by a therapist or investigator, and don't only report childhood events. They're also physically missing when they say they've been abducted, and can sometimes provide independent confirmation (from another abductee who was abducted at the same time)." http://www.gregsandow.com/ufo/Contents/Threat_Review/threat_review.htm http://tinyurl.com/55r6q7 Sandow isn't a therapist or hypnotist or abduction researcher; he's a music critic with an extracurricular interest in UFOs, so his evaluation of Jacobs's assertions may suffer from lack of expertise in these areas. But from his description, Jacobs does seem to go to some trouble to address the kinds of reservations Ruth has stated.
