Thoughts about people claiming alien contact

Originally posted by compressedFusion
I have been lurking on this site for a few years. I have focused exclusively on the Alien/UFO section. Over time, I came to realize that I'm not as interested in Ufology as I am with how we interact and treat each other when dealing with this fringe topic. I believe that people claiming contact are treated harshly by society far beyond the extraordinary nature of their claims.

Crazy in the world how you have so many people and so many arguments with too much energy, too much denial from rejecting logic based on personal views. It can be a large large paradox, because it may mean something true to somebody thinking about it in a different light and it can mean different things. 80% of Ufology should be ridiculed by falsification because they are saying an opinion, that voice keeps the 20% of truth from being exposed to the world by this paradoxical cycle of separate consciousness. This is why you have so many wrong people seen as correct (or what really is) and the right people are not recognized.

reply to post by ArdenWolf

We need to drastically take a stand on what evidence is presented and the claims that follow it.

Yes, that is what sources such as Church and Government have been saying about many topics for eons as well.

reply to post by greyer

from rejecting logic based on personal views

I suspect one of the reasons such debates often become contentious is subtly revealed by that phrasing.

For some people, it is a matter of intellectual opinion (armchair debate).

For other people, it is a matter of personal, repeat experience.

They are very different things. Those in the former group often make it 'personal' in the same way that political debates often shift to attack of the individual or their character rather than keeping the focus on the topic. For those in the latter group it could usually only be personal to start with.

I've seen debates on topics such as racial prejudice go similarly, e.g. where people in one group were sure the others were just hypersensitive and paranoid, if not outright lying, and people in the other group felt like eons of close-up personal experience were being invalidated with someone's hand-waving arrogant dismissal. I suspect that, in line with the OP's beginning to this, these are human traits and social patterns we could see echoed around us in many areas, not just this particular topic.

Originally posted by ArdenWolf
It's the general populace, the sheep of the nation you need to win over. That cannot be done if everything they see looks like a joke.

I think that's likely true. However this may simply reveal that for some topics (to include some technologies, too), our culture is simply not ready for them.

If you can sway the people the media will follow, because it's all about ratings.

I think in a socio-political culture where media is the primary form of swaying the people, it works in the opposite direction.

When something gets massive funding, and it's the people supposedly on the side of disclosure and they put out something so far out there people cannot and will not be swayed by it, because it's asking them to take way too big a leap, it simply does more harm than good.

I agree. In topics where funding is limited, trying to use it for the most conservative and somewhat supportable -- if only empirically -- claims would be best.

Sitting around singing kumbaya in hopes the aliens above come down to spread their peace and love to everybody is a quick way to get people to go, yeah, ok, nutjobs.

Completely agree with that one. The whole "let's signal the aliens with flashlights" thing to me is a completely different genre of social inquiry and the overlap is unfortunate.

The enemies of the cause come on both sides of the fence, some may not mean to. ... on who's side are some people actually on?

Yes, often the 'believers' of any topic are more harm than the debunkers. That is certainly the case in other fringe fields, such as psychic research.

To win, to defeat the ridicule, to get this topic taken seriously, there needs to be respectability, and to get that one needs to look respectable in the first place.

I agree with that, but of course, respectability is based on "cultural norms" and "media-bred expectations" which I think we've already established are violated by the actual experiences and worsened by the hyperbolic presentation of them to begin with.

A lot of people want the truth, they know there's something going on. But in the end, they can't help but feel resentful for the extreme weird and bizarre even if they feel there is some truth to it. Why? Because it makes winning damn near impossible.

It makes a 'comfortable social foundation' difficult or impossible, and those who don't wish to risk themselves by involvement even peripherally pull back. Or as Dan Drasin once wrote:

Ridicule, ridicule, ridicule. It is far and away the single most chillingly effective weapon in the war against discovery and innovation.

The more extreme a claim the more powerful the evidence required

Drasin has some good comments about that as well. This is an infinitely receding evidential horizon, as other controversial fields which do have evidence by the same standards as other things (e.g. crop circles and psychical research) make quite clear.

Hello,

I'm sorry, I seem to have missed the existence of most of a page of this thread somehow, catching up here.

Originally posted by lostgirl
Question: You talked about not wanting any part of doing hypnosis on people for MUFON

Right. For many years prior to the main bulk of a couple years (mainly) of far-out experiences I put in a case study, my primary interest was hypnosis. (Well, and my guitar. ) Not surprisingly, involvement in public groups on the topic tends to have a certain periphery that overlaps (barely) into the fringe fields. I thought they were lunatics (abductees) and I suspected the hypnotists were subtly leading them somehow, so I had no interest.

am I correct in assuming that you never underwent hypnosis by anyone?

Correct. God no. Actually my case study has something to say about this as well:

I tried to evaluate not just what I was thinking or feeling, but also whether it was healthy for me to follow that to its logical end-result. The question was not, “Is this true?” but rather, “Is it good for my state of mind to focus on this, and where it’s likely to inevitably lead?” It’s an issue of priorities: truth matters to me, but my first goal is to survive, and survival requires my head be clear so I can function in the dangerous and desperate situations I often felt I found myself within. Fear is the Mind-Killer, was one of my favorite lines in the book Dune when I was about 18 years old. If I’m in a fugue of paranoia or terror or despair, my head is not clear.

I’ve had people say to me, “How can I not resent the aliens? And how can I not want to ‘find out more of the truth’ about what happened to me?” I can only say, “I don’t know. Will it help you feel better, or feel worse?” Because resenting the aliens doesn’t hurt them. And anybody who thinks going through a traumatic experience with aliens via hypnosis is not going to have any effect except ‘the information’ it provides is not well informed. Trauma is trauma. And most hypnotists in this social genre are not therapists.

Sometimes that is important to dig up, and therapeutic. Sometimes… it isn’t.

I’d spent over a decade of my life intensely focused on self-hypnosis, formally trained in hypnosis along the way, so I had a lot of opinions about that subject. People were surprised to find that was my personal focus right up until a couple years prior to the ‘Bewilderness’ era of time, and yet I’d never been hypnotized in any fashion about these experiences. But they didn’t see it how I saw it: my experience and perspective actually made me avoid it.

I met people that had been “mildly disturbed after a strange confusing dream” they only remembered fragments of – but they were helpless rape victims of weird creatures with god-like powers after some hypnotist “helped them find the truth.” Well maybe that was true, I have no idea. But did that really help them?

Most people I’ve met who seemed the most stable about all this remembered the experiences consciously. It’s possible this isn’t coincidence, and “allowance of memory” relates to an ability to adapt. Maybe digging it out hypnotically brings forth more than the psychology is ready to deal with.

I have seen a lot of psychological degradation and growing destabilization in people having these experiences, and I think it’s important to note that I am not saying they were crazy and so imagined them, I am saying that the experience of having them, combined with our cultural paradigms about all this, all the fear and confusion it causes, all the profound destruction to fundamental belief systems, is destructive and gets worse the more people focus on it.

Maybe partly because there just isn’t any closure, any answer, which is so exasperating. You reach a point where it seems like there is nothing more you can learn, like the available information in our culture just runs out and you come to a dead-end, with more questions than you began with and nowhere else to go.

At the time, I was working hard to stay positive. Perhaps if it had only been ‘aliens’ in my life it would have been different and I might have been more like others who wanted to investigate more of it. But I was having trouble with everything from alternate realities to overlapping identities, from a myriad of entities to constant missing time, and focusing on the many unhappy things that might also have happened to me that I didn’t fully remember, that seemed like it would have been far more harm than help.

The reason I ask is because it seems to me that your story might be of significant 'value' in research circles due to the lack of sources (i.e. excessive reading on abductions and possible 'leading' by hypnotists) of memory 'taint' you have been exposed to.

In my view, a lack of physical evidence means the only thing there is to 'research' is essentially the sociological/psychological account. I recorded it as honestly and completely as I could, narrating my journals and letters to friends from the period, and to me that is about all that can be done. I'm getting around to putting it on amazon kindle early next year, when my best friend gets off his butt and makes me the cover graphic he promised.

I have to tell you that the minute I start even briefly reading 'abductee researchers', I become a skeptic. The number of paradigms, assumptions, and often unprofessional and even immature behavior on the part of people everywhere in the field is rampant. Frankly I think much of the UFOlogy field, whatever success it rarely has in presenting itself as a whole, is despite most of its 'experts and leaders' -- not because of them.

Also, there is a whole subculture in the UFO field who consider most of the leading hypnotist-alleged-experts to be bozos, and leading their subjects and/or very much trying to force everything into their own paradigms -- and these are even people with fully conscious experiences who are definitely not against the field or scoffing at anyone's experience. I guess what I'm saying is that in order to be part of anyone's so-called research, I'd have to respect them, and aside from Vallee who left the field --- for good reason -- and he is not that kind of researcher anyway -- I don't know of anyone I actually respect in it. To be fair I have limited exposure to it, so perhaps there are people I would. Mostly, I just pick up little quotes, refs from people when occasionally on a forum such as this, that tends to (unfairly, perhaps) form my opinions.

When I began my case study, it was actually based on the inspiration of a certain experience within it -- one that inspired a literal frenzy of behavior (I was sleeping about 1 hour per night while collecting years of dreams/letters/journals from my computer archives and starting to put it together, barely eating -- seriously I was acting like I was possessed, and I was staying with friends who were really worried about me), and part of that was the idea (I have no idea why as I hadn't read his book) that I needed to get the end-product to Dr. John Mack. The obsession passed, and I continued the project until it was done. I never got around to sending it and he died. Bummer.

I might add that I put my account free on the internet in early to mid 1996, and some minor elements of it showed up in the brilliant 'cultural-compilation' movie The Matrix, which I have to tell you left me sitting in the movie theatre in shock for awhile. After a bit into the movie that stopped though. For awhile there, though, I thought I was going to have a heart attack at the bizarre overlaps! I had even begun each of the chapters with an Alice in Wonderland quote, which was also in there. Such a trip. The Wachowski siblings did an awesome job on that. I wasn't so much fond of the next two sequels, or the acting of the lead in the first one (not a fan of Keanu as an actor for some reason, though he seems nice enough as a person), but I thought the compilation of ideas -- leading to a whole framework I'd never have thought of in a million years I bet -- I thought that was brilliant.

At this point, I am old. It's been 20 years since that period began with me, and although I still have experiences you could class as "transpersonal psychology" (I am currently focused on a sort of jungian kind of meditative practice), I rarely talk to aliens anymore. But the benefit of this is that I am no longer suffering the physical and psychological destabilization that the experiences tend to bring on. I was really struggling at the time, not just from those but from the life-wide overwhelm of weird of which that was just one part.

In the (albeit amateur) research I've done, I have found that in comparing stories, abductees harboring such tainted memories become very obviously so - which then rules them out (to me) as valid subjects for aiding in determining (if we ever can) the true nature of abduction phenomenon.

Oh yeah. Horribly so. I said in my case study that it was clear there was some degree of individual focus that might be influencing the experiences that actually were invoked, never mind the filtered memory of them, the possibly confabulated framework of some of that (e.g. 'adding' a degree of classic UFO symbolism to something which might otherwise have lacked it), not to mention the whole social network of people sharing about it in MUFON or online groups, which in my case study I told my friend operated a lot like cults, from what I could see.

So...I'm wondering if you would be willing to tell me more of your story thru private messaging?

Way too long, but I would be happy to give you a free copy as soon as I get it to amazon/kindle. Good, more leverage to inspire my friend to hurry up with the cover pic.

As my job and single mom life both have a ton of details and not enough sleep, and as I only tend to frequent this forum in occasional intense spurts followed by sometimes as much as a couple years out, I am likely to completely forget. So if you are still interested circa ~Feb 2014, please feel welcome to message me. I have a gmail address with my screen name here for personal email.

Originally posted by g2v12

Previous Reply..

edit on 2-9-2013 by g2v12 because: (no reason given)

Thanks for the clarification.

Bit of a caveat in order that people understand where I am coming from: I tend to only follow this subject as a passing interest, I find that online ufology provides a form of entertainment (sorry if that offends anyone) that fills time that I have to spare. I think that the subject is a very interesting "what if", and would be very surprised if we were alone in the universe or even at the pinnacle of technological advancement. I find the "are we being visited" question to be especially interesting as it carries a whole load of potential ramifications and additional questions that need answered. I do however perceive the need for something more solid than a blurry photo or someone's story to be able to take any particular case as being potentially worthwhile.

Jumping ahead a bit re debunking. It has long been my opinion that you cannot really investigate or even take a position on something properly if you start from a subjective basis. This includes preconceptions on items like religion and pre-disposed belief or perceived advantage in some other foundation that sets a persons stance towards a specific outcome from the off. I suppose my opinion is just that, an opinion like everyone else's and therefore only equally as valid, but without a reasonable degree of objectivity a debunkers opinion is as equally invalid as someone making claim of an alien encounter with a similarly subjective foundation for their position. Although I am not as well read on the topic as many here, and am open to correction, I do not recall any strong cases where religion was involved in any format for example, nor when the claimant seeks money in exchange for any alleged "evidence".

I would agree that there are many stories that I personally wouldn't be able to realistically judge either way, as I am not really qualified to make psychological assessments based on people's online forum posts (I am a system developer by trade, and although I have some qualifications in psychology & sociology, and have also in the past managed online forum communities of a few thousand people and often had to make character judgements based on forum posts, I wouldn't like to claim that learning & experience is comprehensive enough to apply to this particular avenue in general).

That said, I would be surprised if people didn't also agree that there are a number of tales so far out there that it is very difficult to apply any element of credibility towards them.

I also think that if there are no set minimum standards or innovation to investigating/evaluating & addressing these cases properly, and if those standards were not applied consistently and objectively, UFO accounts of almost any nature will never be able to carry any weight, and therefore do they really hold any value as evidence to the wider world, or provide some knowledge from which we could form a limited understanding of any alien life that might be out there?

I would argue if that if alien abductions could be proven in some way, we would then be in a position to assert that they do indeed exist, and would be able to make reasonable assertions on a whole host of articles including but not limited to:

What do they look like?
What kind of environment do they exist in?
What kind of technology do they have?
How do they communicate?
What is their ethical disposition?
etc

Moving on; I feel that one of the weaknesses of the Alien Abduction cases in particular is the lack of consistent investigation over time, especially regarding those claiming repeat abduction. If you look at other fringe subjects such as cryptozoology and ghost hunting (I hate when the latter gets bundled into the same category as ufology as its not really related, albeit equally as entertaining) Expeditions are had, equipment is used and techniques are developed in order to attempt to gather evidence. (Yes, I know about Mufon etc, and the various time limited military investigations, but they don't/didn't seem to do much more than ask a few questions).

I might be wrong in this, and perhaps efforts like this do/have happened but if aliens were visiting me regularly, you can guarantee I would at the very minimum have a smart phone on me at all times with GPS tracking features enabled and my home kitted out with surveillance equipment.

Secondly, if discourse was possible, I would be urging the aliens to contact the UN or similar political bodies to organise the acquisition of the information they need in circumstances that are ethically acceptable. In the modern world where even us mere humans have developed technology such as cloning etc, why would an alien race have any need to abduct some random person?

Interesting post, InsertNameHere. Long enough it'll take me a few to address the points in it.

I do however perceive the need for something more solid than a blurry photo or someone's story to be able to take any particular case as being potentially worthwhile.

So far I have not seen reference to physical or physiological evidence which was objectively verifiable as being evidence of 'other entities' never mind 'space aliens,' although I have read of evidence which supports things such as aerial phenomena (on the bright side, radars don't hallucinate, but on the down side, secret technology looks like UFOs).

There is some physical evidence which 'could' be but unfortunately it becomes subjective to "relate it" to the claim, even if one can verify it exists on its own.

For example, if I report an experience where I got lucid, scared, tried to escape a given environment, and some blonde guy tackled me, and I pulled a muscle in my thigh in the fight, and then the next morning I have a pulled muscle in my thigh and bruises not to mention the level of 'trauma' that is its own unmistakable marker, well that means nothing to anybody but me. I could show someone the bruises or some kind of scan of muscle if those exist but so what? You could get such things in all kinds of ways, none of which require aliens, and in fact at least 'most' of which could even happen to you in the middle of night through your own unremembered behavior (such as some MPD symptoms).

If I report implants (which I experienced), well plenty of them removed from others makes clear that they are both obscure and similar enough to body tissue to make them either beyond our technological understanding -- one assumption I think is probably so; or the far more skeptical model I also consider worth considering even though I don't believe it, that they may be some physiological anomaly (let's say some internal version of how deep hypnosis can cause people to raise blood blisters) we cannot yet explain.

It has long been my opinion that you cannot really investigate or even take a position on something properly if you start from a subjective basis.

Probably so. Though it is too soon to take a position on anything if one really doesn't know what is going on. Investigation in the early stages of anything actually merely consists of "collecting information en masse," and then sitting down with it and trying to at least get it into what you might call categories or genres, and then taking one of those and trying to look for correlates. That usually has to happen even before something akin to 'investigation' does.

That said, I would be surprised if people didn't also agree that there are a number of tales so far out there that it is very difficult to apply any element of credibility towards them.

For me as well, but I think part of the problem may be that
a) clandestine technology / operations are probably sometimes using humans as shields and disinformation sources, and
b) the nature of at least "some" of this may be strongly tied to psychology -- even if that is merely a matter of 'conscious memory', not the creation of the experiences -- creating a confounding factor where a large percentage of the subpopulation aware of such experiences, may be aware due to what you might call a problem with psychological 'filters' -- which may result in a portion of them having a lot of psyche issues, which are apparent in their communications.

That is to say, for b), that there is one concept I sometimes had, that a huge % of our population had these experiences, but almost nobody remembered them. The people who did, only did because -- usually, not always -- they had psychological issues that actually messed up the psychological filter which prevented the memory. And of course, that could be leveraged at everyone with such claims, except that a small but decent number of people with such claims are clearly functional and rational in the objective world, and would not have their testimony questioned on most any other subject. Those people are clearly not having 'filter' issues across the board the way the 'seemingly crazy' people are.

Those factors create a huge noise problem in the signal of all this.

I also think that if there are no set minimum standards or innovation to investigating/evaluating & addressing these cases properly,

Standards would be good. Unfortunately standards would require genres, by which I mean, that each genre (e.g. visual sighting vs. contact experience) would have to have its own standards, even though some accounts would overlap genres and would need different standards applied to different portions of the account, as a result.

Unfortunately, standards are nearly always going to be logical, which also means linear, which also means conforming to current understandings about everything from psychology to science.

This is like the joke about the drunk who is looking for his keys a block from where he dropped them because 'the light is better here.'

and if those standards were not applied consistently

Can't be done in a field of self-volunteered researchers. Though one could publish recommended standards and hope grass-roots support in the field would help influence those publishing things to follow them or at least refer to them.

and objectively,

That part is nearly impossible. In my experience, everyone including the experiences and debunkers are clearly biased and usually emotional about it on some level. And actually, I think it is worth considering, while we're at it, that _anything_ which messes with 'the fundamental belief systems about reality' is going to invoke that in everybody -- foundational psychology is an issue for all humans -- and that should be recognized.

Again, reference the joke above: some things may quite literally NOT BE 'objective' experiences. That does not mean they are not experiences or they did not happen. But it rather radically changes the model in which we are forced to consider them.

UFO accounts of almost any nature will never be able to carry any weight, and therefore do they really hold any value as evidence to the wider world,

In my personal view, they are empirical evidence of indications of a greater diversity of sentience operating within a larger perceptual reality than our culture currently understands. We are both biologically filtered, linguistically/mentally restricted and culturally suppressed/influenced, all of which greatly affect our ability to understand the foregoing.

or provide some knowledge from which we could form a limited understanding of any alien life that might be out there?

I think it would help if everyone quit assuming they're space aliens, to begin with. If my very-subjective experiential-observations have any accuracy (they may not, of course), then several of them have been 'here' longer than our recorded history, many evolved here just like we did, and many exist in what you might call 'neighboring frequency bandwidths' which are not here in the "vibrating in the physical frequency-range and beat-pattern" way your sofa is here, but can be here in the way " mutual psychological rapport and shared experience" is (which may or may not BE physical, or be non-physical, or be a third-realm in between).

What do they look like?
What kind of environment do they exist in?
What kind of technology do they have?
How do they communicate?
What is their ethical disposition?
etc

This examples one of the biggest problems with the cultural paradigms though:

Why do we assume there's just one?

Even if we described one very specific kind of humanoid, for example, or one specific kind of craft, why do "they all look alike to us" (like the old ref to racism)?

What if Greys or Blondes take jobs with all kinds of others and so may have very different focus/goal/behavior in different situations?

What if glowing red-orange orbs as tech are like Ford or Chevy and lots of different folks can have them?

What if how they communicate depends not only on the species but on the human and even on the 'way' in which they are interacting (even our own communication varies depending on who we talk to and what medium of connection we've got)?

In other words, for us to even think of those questions, those models -- and those are good questions -- we start out by assuming that the whole alien topic is, in fact, vastly simpler and less complex than our own world.

I have seen the same kind of people, visually, as super-rich bankers, as altruist greenpeace sailors, as psychologists, as physicists, as preachers. I don't have any reason to assume that IF there are other people (they are all people to me, regardless of genetic detail), that they are so fundamentally different from what we ourselves know.

The reason I think this is important is because it affects how we categorize the information we may collect from accounts in this genre. For example, here you've got personX who was terrified and got an anal probe, and personY who doesn't remember much but had terrifying literal 'holes' in their spine when they woke up and got a staph infection, and personZ who was communing with the sweet fragiles empathically and feels sure they are our spiritual brothers, and then personQ who had a classic UFO sighting closeup in their car and was hospitalized for radiation burns. So, um... WTF, right? Clearly the latter two weren't having the same kind of experience as the first two, and who knows about the second and fourth ones because even if 'someone' did that 'to' them (it's pretty hard to put precise patterned holes in your own back or give yourself massive radiation poisoning of that kind, so I'm going with 'other' on those), then it could be anyone including clandestine research from our own people or something like that.

All these things horribly confuse the topic -- there is way more noise than signal in it -- but the only hope for even beginning on understanding has to start with looking at ALL the information, not filtering it yet because we don't know enough to do that, and first attempting to at least classify it into broad and then narrower categories and sub-categories. THEN we can look comparatively at the things in each category, at least. Because until then, we cannot compare jane and her benevolent space brothers to john treated for radiation or jack raving about the anal probe, there is simply no way to make any sense of a topic that has such completely diverse accounts in it.

I believe that the resistance to an intelligent categorization of this field is actually a subtle form of controlled disinformation and chaos in its own way. One of the common forms of scoff debunkery is to drag unrelated things across the lines so either people aren't even talking about the same thing or so you can discredit A by B which isn't even in the same category. I think possibly in part because it may be used as a shield for secret tech (psychological, neurological, electromagnetic, or military, if those don't overlap) and so the more confusion, the better a shield it makes to mix things into.

I feel that one of the weaknesses of the Alien Abduction cases in particular is the lack of consistent investigation over time, especially regarding those claiming repeat abduction.

I think this falls into the problem area that psychical research does. Is it replicable in terms of, if you have enough information collected, showing clear signs of independent-trials with signficant effect-size? Absolutely. But is it replicable in terms of, if you just do it can you trust it's going to happen? Nothing but remote viewing has succeeded to that level statistically and even that is only statistically -- it's a decent effect size. In meta-analysis terms in particular, it actually exceeds the effect size considered so significant in medical research that major trials have been stopped for ethical reasons based on lesser stats. (Ref: Replication and Meta-analysis in Parapsychology, Dr. Utts, 1991, Statistical Science journal. This had rebuttals and response articles as well, including of course one or more who basically said there is nothing to even bother looking at so what a waste of time to even critically evaluate it. Unsurprising, sigh.)

Also it ignores several rather gigantic confounding factors. Like:
a) If whatever-source of other-intelligence is more technologically advanced, they may be aware of our surveillance attempts and simply not bother to show up. After all, I'm guessing we all do assume that if they WANTED us to know all about them they'd probably be on the white house lawn, or whatever.
b) If the "bilocation" technology that I believed in during my experiences exists, then a person's body (or enough % of its frequency to still be solid mass here) could lie in bed all night, and yet the other % of their body still have a perfectly physical experience 'elsewhere,' and then that frequency set combine later. To result in what might be fully, or not at all, or partially, 'physical' symptoms. But even to surveillance, whether by wieght or camera, probably that person was just dreaming.

If you look at other fringe subjects such as cryptozoology

If 'other beat patterns of slightly overlapping frequency bandwidths' turn out to have 'other sentient life,' then cryptozoology may have a lot more to support it than we realize.

I actually have seen, more than once, a person -- we would call it a creature -- that looked a lot like some character in the upper levels of that videogame DOOM (I think whatever version of that was around in 1993 when I was playing it). I seldom reached that level and couldn't find the creature online in pics when I looked.

It had these huge legs, haunches that were probably 70% of its body or more, and a very humanoid face, to me it was incredibly weird looking, and yet cool; "feral intelligence" in the eyes.

I met this repeatedly [see note 1]. It made me wonder if the old grimoirs of fantastical creatures -- and this should include incubus/succubus, as I have met a LOT of people who have encountered entities of that sort including what definitely seemed to be at least 'overapping with the physical' to them -- had more basis to them than we realized.

Note 1: I met this even in jungian meditations 15 years later, which suggests this one was never 'physical' as an experience to begin with -- most of my experiences were assuredly not; only, in fact, the ones that overlap with the so-called 'alien' entities seemed to be.

and ghost hunting (I hate when the latter gets bundled into the same category as ufology as its not really related, albeit equally as entertaining)

Kind of like how horror gets bundled with sci-fi, sigh.

A woman I know has had, in the past, significant poltergeist-style activity with her family home. (She is a normal person who tries to pretend it's not happening.) Some of it is really extreme, I mean REALLY. I know her and her family well and see them regularly, and I'm the only person they'd dare admit such things to LOL. Anyway, so they had seen the ghost hunter stuff on TV and they talked about it and decided to invite these guys to investigate, figuring that given the level of manifestation they've sometimes had (and it is really significant), that although it was unpredictable when it occurred, maybe it would, and they actually hoped that the "experts" if they had them out, could refer them to someone who could GET RID OF it for them. It was a joke. Much like a lot of ufology research, the people (a local division of the TV show group) were morons. If there had been a full manifestation every two hours on the clock in that house they would never have found it. Most of these fringe fields need to be saved from most peoples' good intentions...

I might be wrong in this, and perhaps efforts like this do/have happened but if aliens were visiting me regularly, you can guarantee I would at the very minimum have a smart phone on me at all times with GPS tracking features enabled and my home kitted out with surveillance equipment.

Sadly that didn't exist when I was having most of this, but then again, I would 'come to' abruptly in my house so I had no reason to expect that my body, at least all of it, was going anywhere, even when I very clearly seemed to be having physical experiences.

When I had an experience I came to consider 'implants,' it involved an injury with them and as a result, an actual experience with fully perceiving something when wide awake with the light on which physically reached into my body -- but visually there was nothing there. Talk about frying your brain. But visual is NOT the only 'sense' we have for determining reality. Anyway, so the (possibly superstitious) belief system I ended up with after all that, was that the point of the implants was to "assist in the shift of frequencies in the body" allowing a % of our body to more easily move offside the beat-pattern spectrum which means, to OUR technology and perception, literally moved out of perceived reality -- though it might be just as real to the body in whatever local environment it finds itself.

Secondly, if discourse was possible,

I'm sure cows try to talk to us too, but we just kill them. Most of the entities classified as aliens appear to consider us like animals. They're ranching us, for godssakes.

I did have a great number of conversations with the bug-people, none of which I remembered the content of. I did once find myself in a teaching -- like a classroom -- environment with a blonde (Nordic) as teacher, a woman (that was rare, that environ or that I'd see a female), and I said, I'm so sick of the confusion, I'm so sick of not knowing what is going on, will you please just TELL me?! And many others there with me agreed. So she did at length. And then... I couldn't remember the content. To say this made me completely enraged is an understatement. I once became lucid in a classic (though not greys, but light-beings) 'abduction' experience, and tried desperately to sneak off so I could get some kind of evidence to 'take home.' That didn't work well either, damn it. I was a completely failure for getting any kind of evidence although I desperately wanted to.

I would be urging the aliens to contact the UN or similar political bodies to organise the acquisition of the information they need in circumstances that are ethically acceptable.

I can't believe you said that. You almost put yourself into the wildest abductee category with that logic. That made me laugh out loud! I think your entire model of what is going on here must be radically different from mine.

PS: Perhaps you should also make this suggestion to all modern governments for their military; to the vile factory farm industry; to the leadership of all agri-chem corporations; et al. I'm sure this will have pretty similar results.

In the modern world where even us mere humans have developed technology such as cloning etc, why would an alien race have any need to abduct some random person?

Well that's the problem with making assumptions about something when we don't know what's going on.

1. Who says they're random?
2. Maybe they use our wombs for the first ~2.5 months so merely having a string of DNA is not enough.
3. Who says there are not other more bizarre but less savory elements involved (e.g. a species which perceives the frequencies the human body puts off during sex and orgasm)?
4. If there is more to the overall energetic compilation of the human than we realize -- and I'm overlapping into metaphysics here -- then a child conceived of two humans interacting may have some differences to something merely concocted in a lab, and/or, the womb-host may have certain physiological reactions more ideal for the role (it is certainly the case that much 'experience' of childbirth affects the body of mother and child -- read "Evolution's End" by Joseph Chilton Pearce, but prepare to cry for our species if you do -- so it doesn't seem like a stretch that some degree of this may happen as part of conception, as well).

Those are just off the top of my head. My point though is that your question is valid, but we do NOT know what is truly going on here, so any question that seems to "exclude X because it's just not logical" comes with inherent accidental bias.

Thanks for the extensive replies, allow me to respond in kind.

I've shortened & paraphrased the key topics due to character limits, apologies for that:

Originally posted by RedCairo

Radar

Physical Injury

Implants

My opinion is that radar corroboration is one of the key items currently available that can strengthen a case. It's a reasonable assumption that if there has been evidence that UFO's can be picked up by radar as with some of the stronger cases that we can expect this to generally be true and therefore could be considered as verification for a UFO sighting.

Regarding being beaten up: As you say its not really evidence.

Implants would be, but there doesn't appear to be any real evidence of implants to speak of? Anything technological along these lines will have some kind of evidence in its construction that it is indeed technological whether made of exotic material or not. I am probably not read up well enough to know whether or not there are noteworthy cases containing implants.

a) clandestine /disinfo
b) psyche issues

a) is going beyond the remit of where I see ufology being at right now, before meaning can be applied to any case in particular, the basic verification of things actually happening would need to be proven first. If something is happening, its happening regardless of whether its aliens, special ops or, excuse the pun, fairies at the bottom of the garden. Either way, the reported events either happen or they don't the perpetrator is relatively immaterial at this point.

Regarding b): Psychological issues can absolutely discount a percentage of claims in this subject, and in fact I think it should be a key element of any research done around ufology on a case by case basis. That said, Its more of a difficult one than I think most people realise. There are too many instances of certain types of behaviour through history that have been considered mental illness (voices.yahoo.com... as a set of examples in the 1800s), to be able to safely blanket everyone who claims an alien abduction into that basket.

Unfortunately, standards are nearly always going to be logical, which also means linear, which also means conforming to current understandings about everything from psychology to science.

Nevetheless, for wider society to lend credibility to the subject it is exactly the case that the findings need to be pretty much in line with current understanding of the various sciences. There is a ruleset to go by when attempting to establish fact, and this is part of it, unwritten or otherwise.

various bits about research standards

I guess the Mufons of the world would have to take the lead on this. Placing store in any given organisation will never be everyone's cup of tea, but the current ad-hoc approach of ufology is taking it nowhere other than more conspiracy theories, blurry photos and "I was abducted by aliens" stories.

cultural suppression

So this part is actually already proven in other fields. How information is presented is filtered to us and opinions impressed upon society (en.wikipedia.org...). You don't even need to look any further than particularly patriotic western nations (US & Israel) for blatant evidence in this area.

In relation to ufology in general though, I'm not really convinced that this is a factor. There are more shows that explore this topic than say, news bulletins ridiculing the subject. I suspect that if a UFO landed in a town centre somewhere random for an hour or so and the news crews were able to head out and film it, it would be treated as a serious event rather than a "and finally" story. The problem for how ufology is reported by the media is that they have very little of substance to go on. In fact I would probably say that there is a case for the current wave of documentaries (Ancient Aliens et al) being the result of groups of people being upset that the topic isn't being taken more seriously. To a point, media presented, particularly entertainment media, is a reflection on what society wants to see and ufology probably just isn't important enough a topic to perform any type of soft sell indoctrination on.

one or many?

1 is assumed as if an instance could somehow be proven, it would lend credibility to 1 particular set of beings existing, allowing some data to be established on that 1 group, whether or not there are others.

a) Aliens not showing up for abductions
b) bilocation

a) abductee sort of wins in that case, do they not (other than their stories being considered false if being monitored by investigati?
b) in attempting to prove something like alien abductions, we can only go by established scientific rules, therefore concepts like these, while they make for a good read, must be discounted from the outset in a serious investigation

reply to post by InsertNameHere


Shows like ancient aliens, ufo hunters, ect are there because people are interested. However, due to the bad science and token wacko or wackos of these shows. No matter how interested someone might be in some of the shows claims and proofs, they are forced to denounce most of the show as a result. The bad science makes the few really good stuff in the shows questionable, and the crazy theories thrown out there that are completely unnecessary completely ruin it.

If you come across something that's odd and seems to not fit, something that creates a question that causes one to speculate "I wonder." It needs to be left at that. Maybe a "could it be something extraterrestrial is fine" but crazy theories trying to answer these questions need to be left out. For example William J. Birnes (UFO Hunters) and Giorgio Tsoukalos (Ancient Aliens) are some of the worse perpetrators of this dilemma, the things they say are often so crazy sounding and out there that really the shows end up doing more harm than good. It's pure entertainment and gives no respectability to the field.

If the only way you can get a show about these things on air is to make a joke of it, you're frankly better off not putting it on air at all. It's not getting the info out there, it's making what good info there is circumspect.

People are interested, people do want to know. But what they want to know is the evidence, not someone crazy theory or crazy sounding claims. If there isn't enough credible experiences and good evidence to fill shows with on their own. That is a problem. Extremes draw attention, but they draw the wrong kind of attention.

I've seen all of these shows, and I like when the good questions are asked and to good evidences presented and then shudder once certain people open their mouths and realize, welp that was now made pointless, good job guys.

Originally posted by RedCairo
"alien" diversity

Yeah ok, I will take your point on this.

Where I was going was, hypothetically, if someone was abducted and it could be proven beyond reasonable doubt then we would be able to take notes from that instance and establish more solid data around what that particular encounter involved.

We would be able to understand what the creature/s looked like, how the room/s were decorated, what kind of equipment they had and what function they served. Whether or not there was any evidence around what the social/professional structure might be etc.

One proven case would allow for quite a few leaps and bounds to be made and give some starting basis for refining some of the avenues of speculation that go down a million different avenues and ends up doing barrel rolls back in on themselves right now.

That is of course if they do somehow exist and aren't just a figment of people's imagination

On reflection, going back to being sensible and not carried away, this whole element of ufology actually just needs to be discounted, or at least filed away for future reference, and the methodology for maximising and getting better quality evidence is where the focus realistically needs to be as that is what would potentially define the scope of this area of speculation/understanding.

I can't believe you said that. You almost put yourself into the wildest abductee category with that logic. That made me laugh out loud! I think your entire model of what is going on here must be radically different from mine.

I don't actually have a solid opinion on what's going on, just enjoying all the tales. I suppose that if pressed I would say that if anything is actually going on, it's most likely to be the classic aliens visiting in spaceships. I think there is probably enough supporting evidence as a result of the stronger cases to suggest that something small scale over a long period of time seems to be happening, I'm also not particularly sold on any of the alien abduction stories, although that could be dangerous to ignore if they contain any truth, therefore they are in general worth looking at.

The UN, regardless of peoples opinion on it (personally I don't see what it does either), does provide an international point of focus, which is something that would need to be employed if aliens decided to land and speak to someone tomorrow. An alternative would be NATO (another generally redundant organisation in modern times), but that would only suit the west, & it would be correct for Russia/China to be involved in something like this hypothetical event.

1. Who says they're random?
2. Maybe they use our wombs for the first ~2.5 months so merely having a string of DNA is not enough.
3. Who says there are not other more bizarre but less savory elements involved (e.g. a species which perceives the frequencies the human body puts off during sex and orgasm)?
4. If there is more to the overall energetic compilation of the human than we realize -- and I'm overlapping into metaphysics here -- then a child conceived of two humans interacting may have some differences to something merely concocted in a lab, and/or, the womb-host may have certain physiological reactions more ideal for the role (it is certainly the case that much 'experience' of childbirth affects the body of mother and child -- read "Evolution's End" by Joseph Chilton Pearce, but prepare to cry for our species if you do -- so it doesn't seem like a stretch that some degree of this may happen as part of conception, as well).

Those are just off the top of my head. My point though is that your question is valid, but we do NOT know what is truly going on here, so any question that seems to "exclude X because it's just not logical" comes with inherent accidental bias.

These points are all quite a stretch, but I take the underlying point that there could be items that we don't understand at work. I guess the only place it leaves things to go is back to the "needs to be proven that this stuff is happening" part of the topic, which going back to the very beginning of one of my posts in this thread is why what people consider to be debunkers and skeptics are more interested in the initial proof rather than anything tangential.

Not that it isn't something that might eventually be up for discussion rather than wild speculation, it's just that it can't really carry any weight until there is a more solid foundation to build upon in the form of (sounding like a broken record now) proof that ufos/abductions happen.

Originally posted by ArdenWolf

Shows like ancient aliens, ufo hunters, ect are there because people are interested. However, due to the bad science and token wacko or wackos of these shows. No matter how interested someone might be in some of the shows claims and proofs, they are forced to denounce most of the show as a result. The bad science makes the few really good stuff in the shows questionable, and the crazy theories thrown out there that are completely unnecessary completely ruin it.

If you come across something that's odd and seems to not fit, something that creates a question that causes one to speculate "I wonder." It needs to be left at that. Maybe a "could it be something extraterrestrial is fine" but crazy theories trying to answer these questions need to be left out. For example William J. Birnes (UFO Hunters) and Giorgio Tsoukalos (Ancient Aliens) are some of the worse perpetrators of this dilemma, the things they say are often so crazy sounding and out there that really the shows end up doing more harm than good. It's pure entertainment and gives no respectability to the field.

If the only way you can get a show about these things on air is to make a joke of it, you're frankly better off not putting it on air at all. It's not getting the info out there, it's making what good info there is circumspect.

People are interested, people do want to know. But what they want to know is the evidence, not someone crazy theory or crazy sounding claims. If there isn't enough credible experiences and good evidence to fill shows with on their own. That is a problem. Extremes draw attention, but they draw the wrong kind of attention.

I've seen all of these shows, and I like when the good questions are asked and to good evidences presented and then shudder once certain people open their mouths and realize, welp that was now made pointless, good job guys.

I think the problem here is that they run out of content pretty quickly and then the remainder gets filled with mince because they enjoy having a nice, probably well paid, TV job that they don't want to give up anytime soon. Ancient Aliens is a prime case in point for this, it certainly started off with more interesting content & topics than its later episodes.

I suppose as, being guilty of using this subject mostly for entertainment purposes I don't have as much a problem with this side of things compared to others who take the topic more seriously might.

Other than that, these shows aren't really that bad an entry point into the subject if you catch the right episode.

I doubt that there is any deliberate attempt to turn the topic into a joke (although I do question when they put some well known hoaxers like Greer on these types of show).

reply to post by InsertNameHere


Oh I'm definitely guilty of using this topic for entertainment myself. I'm always in a balance between serious, and entertaining myself with the subject. Though I try to make it clear when I'm simply having an entertaining thought experiment on the subject verses what I actually believe. One never learns if they don't explore alternate ideas. Quite often if I enter a forum I find myself on the opposite side of where my feelings really lie because that's the voice I feel is needed because people are too far on the other side.

For example, I love animals, am very much against animal cruelty, and disagree with the way most slaughter houses and animal farming is done. In almost any forum in which the topics come up, I usually end up on the opposite side of many animal rights activists because they are too extreme, hurting the cause, and not really doing the right things to help it as well as making the wrong stands. If a position is untenable it cannot win.

I'm the type of person that if I argue on a topic, may not actually be on the side I'm arguing, so much as wanting the side I am on, to stop and realize what they are really saying, doing, and how it's perceived.

This is one of those such topics. I believe abductions occur, part of me wonders if I've been there myself due to some past experiences. I, however, have doubts because most of the good ones where when I was younger, and it's supposed to be a life long thing. I very strongly want to find proof that these things occur or don't occur. I want to know what the actual truth is.

It's a reasonable assumption that if there has been evidence that UFO's can be picked up by radar as with some of the stronger cases that we can expect this to generally be true and therefore could be considered as verification for a UFO sighting.

May be true in some cases, I don't know. However:
a) most of that is suppressed even within its own echelons (ref: Vallee) never mind to the public, and
b) Radar UFOs have nothing to do, technically, with claims of alien abduction.

I know lots of people really into what I call nuts&bolts UFOlogy who despise the whole abduction topic.

In fact, I think even if we could find correlation between a UFO sighting vs. a following claimed abduction, we could still potentially consider that
a) the technology beyond our understanding (meaning the craft we can measure but not yet understand) may simply have physiological effects leading to perceptual anomalies on humans within a certain range, or
b) since there are in fact lots of abductions reported which definitely do not involve any form of radar corroboration, it would be reasonable to suggest that even if two such events were reported at the generally same place and time, that the correlation does not imply causation.

Regarding being beaten up: As you say its not really evidence.

Right. Except to the one beat up, of course. Pretty sure they take it seriously...

Implants would be, but there doesn't appear to be any real evidence of implants to speak of?

Plenty of evidence of things in people's bodies they claim are implants. I haven't looked into this but I don't think there is any evidence that the thing in their bodies is "alien technology." For a few notes on that see my post here: www.abovetopsecret.com...

Anything technological along these lines will have some kind of evidence in its construction that it is indeed technological

Translation: anything that exists will look and work at least something like what we already know, even if it's something we don't know anything about. Sadly, this paradigm, though reasonable culturally, has not led to anything useful in the field so far.

before meaning can be applied to any case in particular, the basic verification of things actually happening would need to be proven first.

It's rare even in mundane-world situations that something truly new can be understood out of context; usually the development of understanding and detail kind of happen back & forth and both grow through the addition of the other.

Short of the aliens openly landing or the government openly telling us (and we wouldn't believe them if they did, given we don't believe them about anything else LOL), I don't think that we are ever going to have anything "proven" during my lifetime anyway -- not unless our own technology advances radically and suddenly. Well, the technology in the public sector, I mean.

If something is happening, its happening regardless of whether its aliens, special ops or, excuse the pun, fairies at the bottom of the garden. Either way, the reported events either happen or they don't the perpetrator is relatively immaterial at this point.

This is the most important element, because really: there shouldn't be any doubt something IS happening, only that the source of it -- to include not just your examples but also the 'insanity' and 'hallucination' and 'bizarre perceptual side effect of unknown but physical elements' as well as some metaphysical options -- is still up for debate, and likely varies greatly depending on the person and the account. Given the number of people with similarities in accounts, and not just 'now' but going way back in time, and not just 'here' but all over the world, it seems pretty clear "something" is happening and that something involves what we perceive as other humanoid identities. Sometimes with multiple witnesses and certainly everyone awake and seemingly respectable sane people reporting it. That doesn't make every account or reporter the same but it certainly provides a boatload of "empirical" evidence, albeit not physical.

Psychological issues can absolutely discount a percentage of claims in this subject, and in fact I think it should be a key element of any research done around ufology on a case by case basis. That said, Its more of a difficult one than I think most people realise. There are too many instances of certain types of behaviour through history that have been considered mental illness (voices.yahoo.com... as a set of examples in the 1800s), to be able to safely blanket everyone who claims an alien abduction into that basket.

The mental 'health' profession is a failure on many levels even for far more ordinary areas than alien abduction, so I don't have a great deal of faith in it magically being better for something even more nebulous and complex. It is also the ideal worst-case-example of allopathic-thinking where 'diseases / conditions' are basically just labeled based on a symptom -- without any understanding whatever of underlying cause -- and then any pharmaceutical capable of any nervous system or neural "interference" which may also happen to interfere with one or more of the 'symptoms' is considered 'treatment,' despite that a) it isn't treatment of whatever the underlying cause may be since we don't know it, and b) it likely has a myriad of subtle and often tragic side effects on the body.

My comment in a journal or letter during the period where I was having these experiences was:

I would run not walk from any psych major licensed to force drugs down my throat in their ignorance. If I were seriously in trouble that's the last place I'd go for help. Drugs and labels won't help me. I want to figure myself out, not get chemically lobotomized.

Also, the problem with the whole psych element is that by allopathic-psych standards, even HAVING the experience de-facto makes you qualified for a whole list of labels and medications. Period. No matter how functional the person may be in every way.

In theory, a belief in God should too, it's simply that our culture considers that so common we carefully avoid applying the same logic to that we do to everything else in the mental health field.

Nevetheless, for wider society to lend credibility to the subject

I think we probably need to continue with the 'abduction field' functioning as the lunatic fringe for the next several decades and continuing to simply gather information, try to categorize it, etc. and hope that advances in every field, from quantum physics to transpersonal psychology to neurobiology, will gradually give more insight to the big pile of non-verifiable data.