Edmund Storms wrote:
If the experience is not real, it means that we cannot trust our eyes, our memory or even radar to correctly determine reality.
I do not know about radar but there is abundant proof that we cannot trues our eyes or memory to determine reality. This is why science must be based on objective instrument readings and physical evidence. People's senses are good for nothing when it comes to establishing reality. This is especially true of untrained, amateur observers. A naturalist looking at beetles in the woods may have a reliable memory of the event, but anyone else's memory is bound to mixed up with false memories, mistakes and mythology.
People today and in the past often have experiences that are entirely imaginary. They often mistake dreams for reality, for example. Memory is extremely malleable and not to be trusted at all. This has been demonstrated in many simple tests. For example, in the middle of a psychology lecture, an unannounced fake drama is performed by actors. Say, a woman drops her purse, hits someone, and runs out of the room shouting something. Then the professor asks the students to write what they say. The accounts vary wildly.
It means that hundreds of thousands of people have been deceived by very clever hoaxes . . .
There is no likelihood that abductions are hoaxes. There are countless other experiences in the past, such as people who thought they were visited by witches and succubuses and so on, which were obviously false memories of physically impossible events. But the people reporting these experiences believed them sincerely. Again, psychological tests have shown that it is easy to implant a false memory in most people. The techniques for doing this are settled and have been repeated in many psychological studies.
. . . and we cannot believe anything a person claims to have personally experienced without physical proof, and all that this conclusion implies.
For traumatic and unlikely events, no one should ever believe anything a person claims to have personally experienced, including the person himself. That is never a reliable basis for belief. Highly rational people who are used to studying human beliefs, opinions and reactions know this to be true of themselves, even when their brain is diseased and not functioning correctly.
My late mother was an expert in these issue (public opinion, perception and psychology). In the last years of her life, her mind was affected by Parkinson's and by the drugs she was taking for it. One day she told my sister: "I just came back from a visit with uncle Danny, upstairs." Uncle Danny had been dead for 20 years and she was living in a one-floor retirement home, with no upstairs. My sister went along with it, saying "oh really, and how is he?" A few hours later after a nap she said, "What did I tell you before? Uncle Danny? That's ridiculous; he's been dead for years. It must be that damned medication, causing hallucinations," which it was. I told her that if she were a shade more superstitious or spiritual she would count that as a visit to heaven "upstairs," but knowing too much about pharmacology ruined the experience for her.
Based on our knowledge of psychology, it is 99.9999% likely that all reports of abductions, religious experiences, witchcraft, ESP, hypnotic conditions and similar effects are a product of normal, widely observed brain functions. I mean "normal" in sense that they are widespread and can be induced in most people, and they are not necessarily a sign of pathology (although they were in my mother's case). The cause of these phenomena is not yet known (to my knowledge) but the phonomena themselves been observed and carefully documented by doctors and psychologists for 200 years. Delusions such as abductions, non-existent rapes, witchcraft and the like are not a bit surprising or unusual, and probably about as common as appendicitis was before antibiotics.
If you think you have been abducted, that does not mean you are crazy by any means, any more than it meant that young native Americans who went on "vision quests" and saw impossible things were crazy. The "vision quest" methods were optimized to trigger delusions. Many other rituals, dances that go for hours and other ceremonies are also known to induce delusions or extreme emotions. Soldiers in WWII battles often reported extreme delusions that were more vivid than reality, such as their dead friends walking in front of them, or a woman with scull head trying to entice them into no-man-land (both described by William Manchester in "Goodbye, Darkness"). However, just because these experiences were vivid certainly does not mean they were real!
- Jed
