Alien Abductions: The Real Deal?

First off, im going to need a few minutes of you time.
Please read fully before commenting.

It is all important information, so I wouldn’t bet on skimming through in order to gain the full picture.

I would like to hear your views/experiences of alien abduction, so please do comment.

So, lets take a psychological approach, shall we?

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People who believe they've been abducted by aliens have always resided at the farthest fringes of science, and the claim by a UFO cult known as the Raelians that they had cloned a human being does little to endear abductees to the mainstream. The sect's leader, Rael, maintains that he was plucked from a volcano by almond-eyed aliens who granted him an audience with Jesus, Buddha and Muhammad, each of whom confirmed that humans are descended from extraterrestrials.

But for every Rael, there are hundreds of workaday individuals who claim to have been abducted by aliens. These individuals do not flower into gurus; they struggle alone with memories of unintelligible messages, temporary paralysis and humanoid creatures hovering over their beds. Their stories don't always check out, but their minds do: Psychological tests confirm that abductees are rarely psychotic or mentally ill. Some 3 million Americans believe they've encountered bright lights and incurred strange bodily marks indicative of a possible encounter with aliens, according to a recent poll.

It is a quandary that polarizes researchers at Harvard University. One embattled psychiatrist, John Mack, M.D., argues that these experiences cannot be understood in a western rationalist tradition of science; researchers in the department of psychology, Richard McNally, Ph.D., and Susan Clancy, Ph.D., counter that the explanation--though multifaceted--is hilarious in its fundamental simplicity.

Mack, of Harvard Medical School, is a long-time champion of alien abductees and a paranormal philosopher king of sorts. His 1994 bestseller, Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens, drew international attention with the argument that "experiencers," Mack's term for the men and women he has debriefed, probably are being abducted by aliens.

More recently, McNally and Clancy introduced alien abductees to the laboratory to study trauma and recovered memory in an experimental setting. They believe their subsequent findings explain the entire abduction experience, including abductees' refusal to accept the fact that transcendent, technicolor encounters with aliens are no more than five-alarm fires in the brain.

"Mack is a clinician making observations about human experience, as opposed to cognitive behavioral scientists, who say that if you can't measure it in the laboratory, it doesn't exist." When it comes to people who believe they've been abducted by space aliens, the two camps agree on only one thing: "These people are almost never psychotic," says McNally. "They're not lying. But Mack entertains a range of explanations that are farfetched at best."

Will Bueche, a 34-year-old media director, has long had nighttime paralysis and visions that "have no resolution and seem out of place." For years, he considered them merely suggestive--until he began witnessing beings while wide awake. Some abductees had far more traumatic encounters. Peter Faust, a 45-year-old acupuncturist, believes he endured years of sexual probing by hooded creatures who implanted chips in his anus and stimulated him to ejaculation. After eight hypnotic-regression sessions with Mack, and a battery of psychological tests in the early 1990s, Faust concluded that he is yoked to a female alien-human hybrid with whom he has multiple offspring.

The abduction narrative is a strange hybrid in its own right: humiliating surgical invasion tempered by cosmic awareness. Experiencers travel through windows and walls, tunnels and space-time to reach the starship's examining table, where young women's eggs are extracted and men's sperm are siphoned off. Despite waking bruised and violated, abductees say their love for beings in the alien realm can surpass any human bond and generate a sense of oceanic oneness with the universe that rivals the experiences of a world-class meditator. Faust says he "realized we're not alone in the universe. There are beings out there who care about us. But getting to this point is a long, arduous journey, with a lot of people who want to deny your experience."

Personality-driven explanations for why people with no overt psychopathology report alien encounters have proliferated apace with blockbuster movies about aliens. Psychologist Roy Baumeister, Ph.D., of Case Western Reserve University, argues that abduction reports are made by "masochists" who unconsciously want to relinquish control of their lives. The loss of control is manifest in humiliating encounters with an alien race. To be sure, there is a surfeit of elaborate sex in abduction reports; one study found that among abductees, 80 percent of women and 50 percent of men reported being examined naked on a table by humanoid beings. In fact, many abductees blame aliens for sexual dysfunction and emotional disturbances.

Psychologists have long surmised that abductees may be inclined to fantasy and "absorption," the propensity to daydream or be enthralled by novels. Both alien abductees and garden-variety fantasizers report false pregnancies, out-of-body experiences and apparition sightings. Some psychologists speculate that people like Will Bueche and Peter Faust are simply "encounter-prone" individuals with a heightened receptivity to anomalous experience. Whatever the case, Bueche and Faust found a willing listener in John Mack.

Continued...

[edit on 05/08/2009 by LiveForever8]

Mack used hypnotic regression to retrieve detailed memories of 13 encounters with aliens, all chronicled in Abduction. He has now interviewed more than 200 abductees. He says that he ultimately endorsed abduction reports largely because he found his subjects to be mentally competent. Some were also highly traumatized and most were reluctant to come forward and appropriately skeptical about their experiences.

Mack defends the use of controversial techniques such as hypnotic regression because he prizes the experiential narrative over empirical data. To debrief an abductee is to be "in the presence of a truth teller, a witness to a compelling, often sacred, reality." Mack says he was jolted when his subjects reported receiving telepathic warnings about man's decimation of natural resources. "I thought this was about aliens taking eggs and sperm and traumatizing people," admits Mack. "I was surprised to find it was an informational thing."

The faculty of Harvard Medical School, for its part, was dumbfounded that Mack believed he'd stumbled on anything more than an underreported cluster of psychiatric symptoms. From 1994 to 1995, Arnold Relman, M.D., professor emeritus of medicine, chaired an ad-hoc committee that conducted a 15-month investigation into Mack's work with abductees. "John did good things in his career and gained a lot of respect. His behavior with regard to the alien-abduction story disappointed a lot of his colleagues," says Relman. The investigation ended with much tongue-wagging but no formal censure. Mack was, however, encouraged to bring a multidisciplinary approach to his study of the phenomenon. "No one is challenging John's right to look into the matter, all we're saying is, if you do it, do it in an objective, scholarly manner."

McNally told the assembly that "sleep-related aspects of the experiences might be correlated with different parts of the REM cycle." He was referring to the phenomenon of sleep paralysis, but he hesitated to speak bluntly about it. Many abductees deem sleep paralysis too mundane an explanation for their experiences, so McNally didn't use the term, for fear of "alienating" the very subjects he wanted to recruit.

Sleep Paralysis is a common phenomenon--up to 60 percent of people have at least one episode, in which the brain and body momentarily desynchronize when waking from REM sleep. The body remains paralyzed, as is standard during the REM cycle, but the mind is semi-lucid or fully cognizant of its surroundings, even, according to a Japanese study, if one's eyes are closed. The experience can't be technically classified as either waking or sleeping. For an unlucky handful of people, fleeting paralysis is accompanied by horrifying visual and auditory hallucinations: bright lights, a sense of choking and the conviction that an intruder is present. The Japanese call it kanashibari, represented as a devil stepping on a hapless sleeper's chest; the Chinese refer to it as gui ya, or ghost pressure.

Sleep paralysis with hypnopompic hallucinations (those that occur upon waking) can be so unexpected and terrifying that people routinely believe they're stricken with a grave neurological illness or that they're going insane. When faced with these prospects, aliens no longer seem so nefarious.

Why, then, do some people who experience violent hallucinations upon waking or falling asleep conclude that they have been abducted? One possibility is that people embellish their experience in the course of hypnotic regression. But McNally and Susan Clancy speculate that alien abductees aren't just amenable to suggestion under hypnosis; instead they actively create false memories. They drew this conclusion while studying one of the most contentious issues in psychology today: False Memory Syndrome.

The question of whether or not people repress traumatic memories was thrown into high relief 15 years ago, as psychotherapy patients increasingly recovered memories of sexual abuse, often through such porous techniques as hypnotic regression and guided imagery. Some cognitive psychologists, including McNally, argued that people rarely repress memories of abuse or trauma; if anything, they are more likely to recall the incident. Sexual-abuse victims remain silent "not because they are incapable of remembering, but because it's a terrible secret," says McNally. Other professionals argue that traumatic memories are easily repressed through specific dissociative mechanisms.

In 1996, McNally and Clancy became the first researchers to examine memory function in women who believed they had recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. They found that these women were significantly more likely to create false memories of nontraumatic events in a lab than were women who had always remembered being sexually abused, or women who had never been abused. (The findings are outlined in McNally's book, Remembering Trauma, published this spring. See review, page 81).

False memory was assessed by asking subjects to study semantically related words (such as candy, sugar, brownie and cookie) and then identify them on a list that includes false targets such as "sweet;" words that are thematically similar but not previously presented. Members of the recovered-memory group were by far the most likely to believe they'd seen the false targets.

But McNally and Clancy could not ascertain whether the women had in fact been sexually abused. Since it is unethical to create false memories of trauma, the researchers did the next best thing: They amassed a group whose recovered memories were unlikely to have occurred. Those people were, of course, alien abductees.

Continued......

McNally and Clancy assembled a group whose members believed they'd recovered memories (usually under hypnosis) of alien abduction, along with a repressed memory group whose members believed they'd been abducted but had no conscious memory of the event. (This group inferred their abduction from physical abrasions, waking in strange positions or sometimes just from their penchant for science fiction.) There was also a terrestrially bound control group who reported no abduction experiences.

The recovered and repressed memory groups exhibited high rates of false recall on the word-recognition test. Those with "intact" memories of abduction fared worse than those who believed their memories were repressed.

But could this type of false recall be a function of memory deficits incurred through traumatic experiences? No, says Clancy: "Real trauma survivors exhibit a broad range of memory impairments on this task. Recovered-memory survivors--whether the trauma is sexual abuse or alien abduction--exhibit just one impairment on this task: the tendency to create false memories."

False recall is a source-monitoring problem, an inability to remember where and when information is acquired: You think a friend told you a piece of news, for instance, but you actually heard it on the radio. "Human memory is not like a video recorder," says Clancy. "It's prone to distortion and decay over time. This does not mean that abductees are psychiatrically impaired. I don't think they should be considered weird. If anything, they're just more prone to creating false memories."

Subjects whose personality profiles indicated a high level of absorption or inclination to fantasy were the most likely to perform poorly on the word-recall task. Furthermore, says McNally, every abductee in the recovered memory group described what appears to be sleep paralysis.

Clancy and McNally outlined their findings in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, whittling the abduction phenomenon down to an equation of sorts......

Susceptibility to creating false memories, coupled with a disturbing experience like sleep paralysis and a cultural script that allows for abduction by aliens, may lead one to falsely recall such an encounter. "You don't necessarily have to endorse these experiences to create false memories," says Clancy. "You may have just seen 'The X-Files' and thought, 'That's crap,' but then you have an episode of sleep paralysis that freaks you out, and the show is still in the back of your mind."

And among people wavering about whether or not they've been abducted, hypnosis can push them to embrace this interpretation. In a 1994 experiment that simulated hypnosis, psychologist Steven Jay Lynn asked subjects to imagine that they'd seen bright lights and experienced missing time. Ninety-one percent of those who'd been primed with questions about UFOs stated that they'd interacted with aliens.

Still, if the abduction experience is a misinterpreted bout of sleep paralysis, why do abductees invest it with such emotion? A videotape of a tearful Peter Faust undergoing hypnotic regression is so powerful that Mack says he stopped showing the footage; it freaked out even nonabductees, causing many to erect "new defenses." Terror in the face of potentially false memories was one issue McNally hoped to study with abductees. This question brought him, in part, to the Divinity School conference. "I wanted to know whether people really have to be traumatized to produce a physiological reaction."

McNally collected testimony from 10 subjects with recovered memories of abduction then confronted them with the most frightening details of their own accounts--from violent trysts to swarms of aliens around their beds. Six out of 10 subjects registered such elevated physiological reactions, including heartbeat and facial muscle tension, that they met the criteria for post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Interestingly, subjects with PTSD react physiologically only to their own traumatic experiences, but the abductee group had heightened responses to additional stressful scripts, such as the violent death of a loved one. They even reacted to positive scripts, such as viewing their newborn infant for the first time. Such reactivity, coupled with high levels of absorption, has been linked to the ability to generate vivid imagery, according to McNally. In other words, abductees are more likely to experience a traumatic--or positive--scenario as real, in part due to their fertile imaginations. They will then react to it as such. "Emotion does not prove the veracity of the interpretation," McNally concludes.

For McNally, the most telling difference between abductees and survivors of "veritable" trauma is not physiological but attitudinal. Experiencers unanimously state that they're glad they were abducted. "There's a psychological payoff," says McNally. "This makes it very different from sexual abuse." Trauma survivors of all stripes cite positive spiritual growth, but, "no Vietnam vet says, 'Gee, I'm glad I was a POW.'"

It is understandable that memory lapses, as measured by poor performance on a lab test, pale in comparison to communication with unknown beings. And while abductees may feel assaulted by aliens, they also feel special. For that reason, "They are not trying to demystify their experience," says McNally, whose deconstruction of sleep paralysis for one woman was met with a polite smile and the exhortation that he should "think outside the box." When McNally finally broached the term "sleep paralysis" at Mack's conference, he says, "There was an awkward silence, as if someone had belched in church."

Continued...

Popular Culture……the answer?

It's impossible to disprove these experiences. But what's interesting is how many seem to have been largely shaped by popular culture. Speculation about extraterrestrial beings is ancient, but "alien abduction" as we know it originated in the 1960s, after a New Hampshire couple named Betty and Barney Hill claimed to have been kidnapped by extraterrestrials. Betty was a fan of movies like Invaders From Mars. Her story inspired a best-selling book, a TV movie, and Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Many more people began to report abductions, which in turn led to more books and movies, which led to more people claiming to have been abducted—in a sense, it was Hollywood that had abducted them.

But Clancy goes on to assert, muddily, that people conjure up aliens to satisfy religious desires (unlike James, who did not grant religion status to perception of "presences"). People's imagined contacts with aliens, she speculates, arise from "ordinary emotional needs and desires. ... We want to believe there's something bigger and better than us out there. And we want to believe that whatever it is cares about us, or at least is paying attention to us. ... Being abducted by aliens is a culturally shaped manifestation of a universal human need." To conclude that alien abduction is a religious experience seems a stretch. (Admittedly, I have not yet been contacted.) And it also seems a cop-out, since Clancy is not religious and didn't study the religious tendencies of her subjects. Instead, her research hints at—but does not ultimately tell us much about—the way in which pop culture permeates even our subconscious minds. However you want to categorize alien abduction, the fact that pop culture schlock fills our dreams may be the eeriest part of all.

www.slate.com...
www.psychologytoday.com...

Continued...

Other Possibilities

Temporal lobe disturbance

Another commonly cited source of internal spookiness are the temporal lobes of the brain. Electrical stimulation of the surface of the temporal lobes (usually done on an awake patient when they are undergoing brain surgery) can produce unusual auditory sensations. Similarly, Michael Persinger, a Canadian scientist, has produced strange sensations in his research participants by using magnets to influence temporal lobe function from outside the skull. Such sensations have included feelings of a 'presence', disorientation and fear. It would seem unlikely that a possible abductee would fail to notice if someone placed large magnets near his or her head (or even that they were subject to brain surgery !) before the 'abduction' experience. However, similar effects can be caused by epileptic or similar seizures in the temporal lobes. Many epilepsy sufferers who have temporal lobe seizures report mystical experiences, missing time, out of body feelings or even strange smells or 'atmospheres' prior to, during or after a seizure. It must be remembered that not all forms of epilepsy cause dramatic shaking of the body, and many simply result in brief lapses of consciousness or experiences such as those noted above. This leads us to wonder whether disturbances in the temporal lobes may also contribute to experiences which some people may interpret as an alien abduction.

Mental illness

Surprisingly, overt mental illness may be one of the least likely explanations for abduction experiences. Research has previously suggested that alien contactees are no more likely to show signs of mental illness than the general population, a finding which has been backed up by several other studies. However, many features once thought present only in mental illness have now been discovered to be held by much of the population. If we look at the healthy population as a whole, these features seem to exist on a continuum with some people reporting anomalous thoughts and feelings or having certain traits more than others. In this vein, it seems people who report themselves as abductees are more likely to endorse unusual experiences, be creative and imaginative, have depressive ideas, be suspicious, have dissociative tendencies and to have suffered childhood trauma. So whilst it seems unlikely that the bizarre experiences reported by most 'abductees' stem from severe mental illness (which can produce equally bizarre and seemingly real experiences) it is certainly the case that this group has characteristics that differentiate them from the general population. It is possible that these dispositions may increase the tendency for them to explain an anomalous experience in terms of alien contact.

Memory distortion

Our memories are often infuriatingly fallible, leading us to forget information we want to remember, remember information we'd rather forget, or often confidently recall something that later turns out to be inaccurate.

This effect may also work retrospectively, allowing people to co-opt previous memories to support an abduction account. An early memory study conducted by Frederic Bartlett demonstrated that we reconstruct memories as they are recalled to create a coherent story. This reconstruction takes place using cultural references that give us a frame on which to hang the various remembered experiences. The alien abduction experience is well known to almost everyone, due to the popularity of shows such as the X-Files, and famous cases which have hit the headlines. This may give some people a cultural framework on which they can hang memories from a bizarre, unusual or traumatic experience. Unfortunately it is even the case that naïve or even unscrupulous therapists may push alien abduction as a explanation for a bizarre experience that a client may have undergone. Many examples of therapists willing to use hypnotic regression, a technique noted for its tendency to cause false recall, to recover abduction experiences can be found on the internet. Perhaps giving an off-the-shelf explanation for strange experiences that the brain is quite capable of generating, without the need for extra-terrestrial intervention.

Conclusion

It would certainly be foolish to discount the possibility of anything unlikely, simply because of its improbability. Yet we must also remember that we can often find explanations for anomalous experience within ourselves. As the old doctor's adage goes 'When you hear hoof beats, start by thinking horses not zebras'. This would seem to work as well for zebras as it does for visitors from outer-space.


Further Reading

This article is largely a summary of two recent scientific papers, both of which are well worth reading if you require further information, detailed references or simply enjoy interesting science.

Holden, K.J. & French, C.C. (2002) Alien abduction experiences: Some clues from neuropsychology and neuropsychiatry. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 7 (3),163-178
Click here for a summary.
Clancy, S.A., McNally, R.J., Schacter, D.L., Lenzenweger, M.F. & Pitman, R.K. (2002) Memory distortion in people reporting abduction by aliens. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 111 (3), 455-461

www.kuro5hin.org...
www.slate.com...
www.psychologytoday.com...
en.wikipedia.org...
en.wikipedia.org...
www.abduct.com...

Thanks.

not really on topic but john mack died in a car accident. the only genuine listener..

dead.

reply to post by LiveForever8


Wow, what a great presentation of two very, very good articles on a major facet of ufology. Star and flag, although I believe around 10-20% can not be explained in mundane terms and likely are real encounters with UEs(Unknown Entities) I do think the rest could be explained in the terms presented here. Thanks for sharing this with us. Here is something I want to point out:

Surprisingly, overt mental illness may be one of the least likely explanations for abduction experiences. Research has previously suggested that alien contactees are no more likely to show signs of mental illness than the general population, a finding which has been backed up by several other studies. However, many features once thought present only in mental illness have now been discovered to be held by much of the population. If we look at the healthy population as a whole, these features seem to exist on a continuum with some people reporting anomalous thoughts and feelings or having certain traits more than others. In this vein, it seems people who report themselves as abductees are more likely to endorse unusual experiences, be creative and imaginative, have depressive ideas, be suspicious, have dissociative tendencies and to have suffered childhood trauma.

I totally agree with that, we can see that here on ATS, with some members who claim to have encounters.

Again, great thread and the best scientific article on this phenomena I have seen in some time, it was much needed.

I'd like to contribute to this thread. I am a sufferer of sleep paralysis. It hasn't happened to me in about 3 years. It occurs irregularly. Just last week though I was on the computer reading through fstdt.com and I had began to doze off (Not entirely sleep yet). I suddenly felt/heard this buzzing sound in my head and my eyes flew open. What I saw shook me. My first thought (I'm laughing just thinking about it) was ,"What the f*ck is that?" It's best described as a reptilian, three digit, clawed hand floating above my head (This night for some odd reason, I feel asleep at the foot of my bed). With the prior cases of sleep paralysis that have happened to me I've never saw anything. I was terrified. I tried to yell out for help or move but if you have ever suffered from sleep paralysis you know that it's a losing battle. I was almost certain I was probably going to die...now that I think back to it I don't remember feeling as If I was in any danger at the time or any malice coming from the apparition. It's just when something like that happens to you and there is nothing to stimulate your mind into thinking about something like that (hadn't watched anything scary or anything along those lines), it shakes you to the core. So I clamped my eyes shut and started going over the ritual I had created during my first experiences with S.P (age 4-5) to rouse myself out of paralysis. I always began with my fingers because I have found that they are easiest to move if I concentrate enough. I would liken the act of moving my fingers to someone who had just gotten in an accident that ruptured their spine and it would take years of physical therapy before that could even make their pinky toe move. The effort it takes is staggering but when you finally get pass that the rest comes a bit easier. Once I had my arm moving (small jerking spasms), the paralysis lifted and I jumped out of bed, eyes open and alert. No floating hand or whatever creature the hand was attached to. Needless to say I turned on every light in the house...couldn't get back to sleep that night.

Note: One thing I would like to say is that I know I wasn't dreaming I was completely lucid.

Hope I contributed. No time for editing I'm in school and the bell has rung for lunch . Yum.

Edited after I have stuffed my face: After my night of virtually no sleep (I refused to go to sleep 'til the sun rose) I did a little research into why I had saw the hand (glad I didn't see what was attached to it). I came to find out that there are COUNTLESS accounts made by people that they have woken to see "something" sitting on their chest or hovering above them or anything in between. This comforted me in a way because I knew I wasn't alone in seeing these apparitions and that narrowed the chances of me being crazy marginally. After reading through a couple of things, I vowed that I would try to remember as much as I could and learn as much as I could from whatever it was I encountered if I ever encounter something like that again. I was caught off guard that time and I allowed fear to take me...never again.


[edit on 10-9-2009 by serenesupreme]

[edit on 10-9-2009 by serenesupreme]

reply to post by jkrog08


Thanks jkrog08

Yer, it was a very good article i felt i needed to share with everyone.

For too long 'abductees' have either been labeled 'liars' or 'mad'. I think studies like these can go to prove they are in fact neither.

We should never underestimate the power of the human mind.

Thanks.

reply to post by serenesupreme


Hey serenesupreme, thanks for sharing your experience

That sounds like a case of sleep paralysis to me.
The buzzing.
Inability to move.
Acute sense of danger.

Dont know if you clicked this link but it includes a picture Henry Fuseli which might interest you.

Also:

The Japanese call it kanashibari, represented as a devil stepping on a hapless sleeper's chest; the Chinese refer to it as gui ya, or ghost pressure.

Strange how there are so many similar instances from all over the world.

Also, you might want to check if you saw anything on television, comic book etc or heard anything on radio that could have acted as a trigger.
I believe that things we experience in everyday life can be the catalyst.

Thanks.

Very interesting read. It would be great to have this in a video presentation as well.

As a person who's believed to have been several of these things, it is also rather hard to believe my own imagination would be as vivid and capable, when my dreams are for the most part; really stupid.

I haven't had very many sleep paralysis events that were related to any type of abduction scenarios.

I've had some bizarre experiences in doctors offices during procedures such as x-rays and freaked out technicians.

I've had recalls of surgeries typically more like emergency house calls than actually taking me anywhere. Very few times of actually being on what I thought was a craft.

One reported sighting was very close to where I was and with nearly the same identical number of craft as was a childhood memory that was about 30 years earlier.

www.ufowisconsin.com...

This was on a farm my family used to go to on vacations in Soldiers Grove Wisconsin. It's interesting and a bizarre coincidence that there wasn't any similar reports in this area 30 years ago. This might suggest time jumping by them as well.

Although the abduction memory is more vivid or real than my dreams, it doesn't mean this memory wasn't implanted. My various other recalls was that I would also time shift ahead into the future as if to personally witness a future event as if my own. Some might say this is remote viewing.

I've had recalls of having gone through some limited training back then and met people such as Russell Targ.

It is really depressing to be treated and or feel at this site as if I'm just a schizophrenic/delusional. But I would also think this if I read these stories of mine.

I've had proof before, or at least what I would think is. But these things are lost or stolen. It may be that all I have is implants, but I'm almost afraid of NOT seeing these on x-rays...... or even again.

I suppose the one main blessing I do have is that people don't bother me as if some bizarre celebrity. That alone would be traumatic.

I have been diagnosed as having dissociative disorder or dissociative identity disorder. Even recalls of speaking other languages. But nothing vivid enough to know exactly what and if I said or knowledge of the languages now. It was more like possession and or a host.

I wa given a tape recording in outpatient therapy allegedly speaking german, but a former friend of mine took it. It's all very discouraging in one way or another.

It has gotten to the point here as if I've exhausted my desire to discuss anymore. ( yea!) :........." If you ignore them, they'll eventually go away."

Many of my recalls of experiences were not favorable or wonderful. Some alledged healings and special moments such as others speaking to those who've passed on. ( Taken )

The recent movie Gamer is similar to the hosts I'm referring to.

www.comingsoon.net...

The other movie Surrogates is also related, but using androids.

www.comingsoon.net...

The people who 'supposedly' have been doing this have also been called watchers. My belief is that these are also elites that have this technology, except it can cause brain cancer in the human brain.

The movies are similar in some way to the Matrix, but you have to plug in somehow anyway.

When they finally make a movie about aliens and or reptilians doing this, people might GET IT.

reply to post by aleon1018


Thanks for sharing your experiences aleon1018

it is also rather hard to believe my own imagination would be as vivid and capable, when my dreams are for the most part; really stupid.

Never underestimate human imagination, the reasons why are all around you.

You seem to be experiencing some rather unusual events. If i were in your situation i would keep a sleep/dream diary. The very moment you wake up, start writing down what you remember from the night, as its the first few minutes that make all the difference.

You may be surprised with what you find, and it could give you some answers.

Thanks.

reply to post by LiveForever8


I've had what apparently was some type of OOBE in 1991 around 6/21.

To make a longer story shorter, I had gone back to sleep and went back to the same place the night before and when I woke up to a knock on the door, I had black hair and a necklace in my right fist 'supposedly' from this OOBE.

Later that day, an englshman came to the door and gave me a book describing the event as if I had gone back in time.

The book was called Pandoras Box and I'd recalled having seen a movie on it made in the 70's. It was basically a love story and a time traveling spirit or whatever. ( or OOBE time traveler)

Supposedly, this book has been banned in the USA. I find this excuse really hard to believe.

Even if this was some elaborate elite mind control game, it was most interesting, like a sample teaser.

The necklace was apparently Egyptian or that area/era and in the center of the necklace was a vulture with wings spread like an eagle that faced the left on one side and the right on the other or backside. Supposedly, it was worn so the head of the vulture or bird would be facing the rising or the setting sun.


I recall I had much later after recalling the past event, ( or 13 years)having found something at the local library about the book and the author.

I have very few if any dreams that are noteworthy anymore. But I have started to recall some of them again in the past few years..

I think one of the most unique things about the human race is that we apparently have free will, to some extent, using our imagination. Even though, it's been suggested that animals such as dogs have dreams.

The problem is apparently fully understanding the source and using it for ALL of our benefit.

I've thought about background recordings played to influence the type of dream and have heard in the past about this as a learning aid.

Sleep studies are a very interesting field. I've yet to keep a journal on my dreams next to my bed and had tried a couple times. Most dreams didn't seem noteworthy, especially after waking up and just plain sleepy-head lazy.

I'd had a few stories I'd recalled on my computer, but were lost at some point in a computer crash.

I'd like to add one further possibility to your list. Alien abduction experiences were accidentally induced in 2000 during the first medical trials of '___' (Dimethyll-tryptamine), an hallucinogen that is present in the brain of all mammals, released from the pineal gland.

See Dr. Rick Strassman's book: "'___' - The Spirit Molecule."

He hypothesises that under certain circumstances, such as the onset of sleep (when '___' is naturally released to induce dreaming), mild strokes and any other incident which causes large amounts of adrenalin to be released can overcome the protective ring surrounding the pineal gland and cause a flood of '___'.

The experiences described by some subjects during the trials mimic exactly common alien abduction experiences. Some 62% of subjects reported some kind of contact with an external intelligence, and some had the full on probing in a high-tech environment by greys or reptilian aliens.

This doesn't actually infer the non-existense of the beings encountered. There is speculation that '___' enables the perception of deeper layers of reality, other dimensions possibly.

reply to post by Karilla


Thanks for the great input Karilla, here is some more info for those who want to know more.

Strassman, a psychiatrist in New Mexico, traces spirituality to a single compound, dimethyltryptamine, or '___'. In his book '___': The Spirit Molecule, Strassman proposes that '___' secreted by our own brains plays a profound role in human consciousness. Specifically, he hypothesizes that endogenous '___' triggers mystical visions, psychotic hallucinations, alien-abduction experiences, near-death experiences, and other exotic cognitive phenomena.

But what makes '___' unique among the known psychedelics is that trace amounts of it naturally occur in the human body. Scientists first isolated '___' in human blood in 1965, and in 1972 a group led by the Nobel laureate Julius Axelrod of the National Institutes of Health detected the compound in human brain tissue.

Volunteers also reported visions that did not fit neatly into Strassman's scientific or spiritual worldview, however. Forty-seven percent encountered otherworldly beings, variously described as clowns, elves, robots, insects, E.T.-style humanoids, or "entities" that defied description. These bizarre beings were not always friendly. One of Strassman's subjects claimed to have been eaten alive by insectoid creatures. In part out of concern about this negative experience, Strassman discontinued his research.

discovermagazine.com...:int=2&-C=


Extremely interesting i think you wil agree.

Thanks again

Wow - the part about the devil holding you down. That's exactly what happened to me a good few years afgo. Whilst it was instigated with me doing a bong which I shouldn't have, I remember seeing myself from above and the devil ripping my soul from my body. Scary day, never again.

Ps don't know if your a liverpool fan but if so you were lucky yesterday.

Originally posted by LiveForever8
reply to post by serenesupreme

 

Hey serenesupreme, thanks for sharing your experience

That sounds like a case of sleep paralysis to me.
The buzzing.
Inability to move.
Acute sense of danger.

Dont know if you clicked this link but it includes a picture Henry Fuseli which might interest you.

Also:

The Japanese call it kanashibari, represented as a devil stepping on a hapless sleeper's chest; the Chinese refer to it as gui ya, or ghost pressure.

Strange how there are so many similar instances from all over the world.

Also, you might want to check if you saw anything on television, comic book etc or heard anything on radio that could have acted as a trigger.
I believe that things we experience in everyday life can be the catalyst.

Thanks.

reply to post by booda


Ouch! That does sound scary.
Its a lot more common than people would at first believe, i hope it never happens to me. I don't like that sense of a lack of control.

And yes, i do happen to support the greatest team in the world, Liverpool FC
It was a terrible game to watch. I dont know about lucky, you make your own luck in this world, we got the job done, thats all that matters

Definately the real deal. Mine started years before it hit the mainstream media. I've never been regressed, just seem to remember parts of it. In fact at one point I had a theory that they didn't actually wipe memories, it was just the trauma of the experience that caused them to be repressed.
Have been told it's just some kind of halucination brought on by sleep paralysis but that doesn't explain how it happens when I'm stood upright in the middle of the day and lose three hours. If I was stood up dreaming for that amount of time I think I would feel it in my legs afterwoods, or fall over. I should also mention that I regularly wake up with SP and recognise it. No greys in those instances. Also I've never had this pressure on the chest either.
There's nothing I could add that you won't have read about I think, but wether it's aliens or government behind it it's hard to say. I've been saying for years that I get taken to some underground place.
Of course I fully accept that I may be a nutter, but I don't think so as why would my experience tally with so many others?
Don't know what you hope to acheive with this thread but I'll keep reading it and post any additional info if I think it will help.

ps there's a similar thread going at the moment.

reply to post by ENGLISH BOB


First point, this thread was made weeks ago. I know of the existing thread, i posted the link to this thread in there just before. I thought some people might be interested in it. Is that not how you got here?

Second, thanks for sharing your experiences. They do not seem to fit in with any of the possibilities expressed in this thread. So maybe you truly are experiencing alien abduction.

Lastly,

Don't know what you hope to acheive with this thread but I'll keep reading it and post any additional info if I think it will help.

I don't hope to achieve anything, except share a very interesting article and psychological experiment/theory.

Thanks.

Absolutely fantastic thread, Live! Nothing less than completely amazing to me at such a deeply personal and intimate level.

I am one of those Experiencers/Creative types and I have categorically experienced every single scenario outlined in the OP. I'm astonished. Although I have never gone so far as to use the words "Alien/s" or "Abduction" because I have a very strong pragmatic and practical side that I slowly but surely nurtured with Zen Buddhism.

The Buddhism or should I say more accurately, the exercising of "Oneness" type meditations helped immensely as the realization of all events, things and anything "made", in other words witnessed in my psyche were illusory and thus transient and thus not real.

Realizing that in the moment, everything past and future could not hurt me nor could they ever because they are "ME".

That is as philosophical as I will get with this thread. I just wanted to illustrate what I did to alleviate the anxiety and stress I carried consciously and subconsciously as a direct result of traumatic childhood events both physical and perceived.

I thank you again for bringing this wonderful information to light here. You have no idea how affirming and relieving it is to me and I would bet to many, many others.

Cheers,

Erik