Originally posted by The GUT
Excellent observations, Vandelay. If you haven't read them I highly recommend the books below. They are the full volumes in pdf form.

While I take neither as complete gospel, I do believe they both make some very interesting and highly-intelligent suppositions about the very points you mention.

Passport to Magonia by Jacques Vallee

Operation Trojan Horse by John Keel

Valle especially, and Keel to a degree, hypothesize that the phenomena "molds" itself to the culture of the times and particular place.

Now that could be because it's all in the mind, but it could also hint that the phenomenon stems from an intelligence that is trying to "reconstruct" our beliefs and present themselves in ways that are time/location appropriate.

EVERY now and then there occurs the phenomenon called a crime wave. New York has such waves periodically; other cities have them; and they sweep over the public and nearly drown the lawyers, judges,
preachers and other leading citizens who feel that they must explain and cure these extraordinary outbreaks of lawlessness. Their diagnoses and their remedies are always the same: the disease is lawlessness; the cure is
more law, more arrests, swifter trials and harsher penalties. The sociologists and other scientists go deeper into the wave; the trouble with them is they do not come up. I enjoy crime waves.

I made one once; I was a reporter on the New York Evening Post. Jacob A. Riis helped; he was a reporter on the Evening Sun. Many other reporters joined in the uplift of that rising tide of crime, but it was my creation, that wave, and Theodore Roosevelt stopped it. He was the President of the Police Board. But even he had to get Riis and me to stop the wave. I feel, therefore, that I know something the wise men do not know about crime waves, and so get a certain sense of happy superiority out of reading editorials, sermons, speeches and learned theses on my specialty.

Entire article here

For starters, the work by Bella DePaulo, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of Virginia, confirms Nietzche's assertion that the lie is a condition of life. In a 1996 study, DePaulo and her colleagues had 147 people between the ages of 18 and 71 keep a diary of all the falsehoods they told over the course of a week. Most people, she found, lie once or twice a day (...). Both men and women lie in (about) a fifth of their social exchanges lasting 10 or more minutes; over the course of a week they deceive about 30 percent of those with whom they interact one-on-one. Furthermore, some types of relationships, such as those between parents and teens, are virtual magnets for deception: "College students lie to their mothers in one out of two conversations," reports DePaulo. (Incidentally, when researchers refer to lying, they don't include the mindless pleasantries or polite equivocations we offer each other in passing, such as "I'm fine, thanks" or "No trouble at all." An "official" lie actually misleads, deliberately conveying a false impression.

Touching up scenes or past performances induces none of the anxiety that (typical) lying or keeping secrets does, these studies find; and embroiderers often work to live up to the enhanced self-images they project. The findings imply that some kinds of deception are aimed more at the deceiver than at the audience, and they may help in distinguishing braggarts and posers from those who are expressing personal aspirations, however clumsily.

About the only personality characteristic the sample group had in common was schizotypy. People with schizotypy are more likely than others to be perceived as eccentrics, engage in magical thinking and experience perceptual distortions. For example, one might “sense” the presence of another person. They tend to interpret incidents and events as having a special and unusual meaning. They may be prone toward a belief in superstitions. While people with schizotypy are not psychotic, they have a greater likelihood than the general population to have close relatives with schizophrenia. Clancy concludes that “these people are not crazy. They tend to have unusual ideas, experiences, and beliefs – ones that don’t necessarily conform to mainstream social beliefs and tendencies. They believe not only in alien abduction, but also in things like ESP, astrology, tarot, channeling, auras, holistic medicine, and crystal therapy.

Originally posted by Brighter
reply to post by Druscilla

---

I'm consistently amazed at your inability to think clearly about this subject. Most of your recent posts, where you focus on these supposed psychological 'issues' of UFO witnesses, as opposed to focusing on the content of their observations, are examples of another basic logical fallacy called an ad hominem argument.

An ad hominem argument is one in which someone focuses on the character of the person making the claim, as opposed to focusing on the claim itself. It is often employed by someone who knows that they don't have much of an actual argument to counter the person's claims, so they feel backed into a corner and begin attacking the person's character.

This is a common technique by the debunkers / deniers, especially the ones who are aware of the enormous amount of evidence for the existence of UFOs, as it represents their last chance at trying to save a shred of self-esteem as they watch their preconceived beliefs about the world fall to pieces.

The enormous irony in all of this is that the recourse to ad hominem attacks that question someone's psychological stability is itself an emotional lashing-out, as all reason is thrown out the door.