from Budd Hopkins re: recent abduction studies

by **professorpan** » Wed Dec 21, 2005 2:15 pm

<a href="http://www.intrudersfoundation.org/faith_based.html">www.intrudersfoundation.o...based.html</a> Budd Hopkins's refutation of the McNally/Clancy studies of abductees. It's long, so I'll just post a couple of excerpts. -- <blockquote>Quote:<hr>Early in the Susan Clancy enterprise, any hopes I had for her objectivity evaporated when I learned that her purported abductee subjects were to be self-selected. She had placed ads in a number of newspapers, asking for those who believed they had had UFO abduction experiences to contact her. Little or no vetting took place, and her unscientific protocol thus opened the laboratory door to anyone who claimed to be an abductee. Her subjects were not a group whose accounts had been investigated and accepted as reliable by experienced researchers, but instead, Clancy accepted virtually anyone who came in off the street and told her they were, indeed, abductees. Some of her subjects had such tenuous, even vapid reasons for believing they were abductees - a "mysterious bruise" or a "vague feeling" - that knowledgeable researchers would have immediately shown them the door. The uncritical Dr. Clancy, however, made them part of the "abductee" group she studied! Anyone familiar with the phenomenon is aware that very few abductees will come forward to discuss their experiences publicly, or to subject themselves to "testing" of any kind by people or organizations that they do not know and trust. Doing so would be to run the very real risk of becoming targets for career-threatening ridicule. Obviously, the more highly credentialed abductees are the most hesitant to volunteer as test subjects because they have the most to lose. Neither the NASA research scientist, the NASA engineer, nor the many psychiatrists, psychologists, police officers and military professionals who, over the years, have reported their abduction experiences to me, would ever involve themselves in what might well turn out to be sensationalist and incompetently mounted tests of one kind or another. Adding to that basic flaw in her study, my second concern had to do with the fact that neither Clancy, whom I had twice met, nor McNally made any attempt to contact Dr. David Jacobs or me. They were both undoubtedly aware that the two of us have accumulated between us masses of data after decades of work with literally hundreds of abductees. We were never consulted on any issue, nor was our help in vetting test subjects called for. In retrospect, Dr. Jacobs and I could have easily prevented the two testers - innocent of the complex work of actual investigation - from making many of the egregious errors which have so seriously damaged their work. The results of McNally's test for signs of posttraumatic stress disorder were significant. Those reporting abductions showed virtually the same intensely emotional reactions upon hearing their taped accounts replayed as did the Vietnam vets when they heard the tapes of their traumatic war experiences. But as we soon learned in McNally's analysis of the test results, the devil was not in the details themselves but in his interpretation of the details. He announced that, since we "know" that UFO abductions don't exist, all of his subjects' accounts have to be false memories. And since they registered just as powerfully as "true" memories, what the test shows, he explained, is that "false" memories can be just as traumatic as "real" memories! This classic illustration of "heads I win, tails you lose" circular reasoning provides a perfect example of ideology trumping science. Unfortunately, as astronomer J. Allen Hynek once remarked, science is not always what scientists do. In effect, McNally seemed to be saying that even if his own test results support the traumatic reality of the abduction phenomenon, that fact changes nothing since UFO ABDUCTIONS JUST DO NOT EXIST, and that somehow, someway, he will make his test results fit his hypothesis! McNally's ideological interpretation of the test results - a clear example of "faith-based science" - is just as rigid in its way as the creationists' willful denigration of evolution, no matter what the fossil records have revealed. Susan Clancy's word memorization test as an indication of false memories is far more tenuous than McNally's test for the presence of posttraumatic stress. (This is perhaps not the place to go into its technical inadequacies, other than to reiterate what I have already said about its fatal flaw - the reliance upon an unvetted, self-selected sample. I will return to the specifics of her work in a later paper.) Instead, the problem I would like to discuss is her use of a rather simple word memorization protocol to ratify her belief that a subject's demonstrably traumatic memories are false. Clancy baldly stated in an early newspaper interview that she assumed everyone would accept the idea that all abduction experiences were false memories, because "everyone" knew there were no such things as UFO abductions. This, she apparently thought, was settled truth - and another illustration of irrational, faith-based science. So, at the outset of their work, neither she nor McNally intended to raise even the possibility that such things as UFO abductions might have occurred, let alone to actually investigate that possibility. The ideology they shared assumed that such experiences were, ipso facto, false memories, a theory the two seem to believe as fervently as the Pope believes in the virgin birth. Another analogy comes to mind. Instead of a group of abductees, imagine an equal number of women who have reported rape experiences and who are now to be tested by a pair of experimental psychologists. The psychologists state at the outset that they do not believe any of these women were actually raped and are proceeding on that assumption. Thus their goal is not to investigate the veracity of the women's claims but to discover a way of establishing their "tendencies to fantasize and form false memories." Since the testers "know" in advance that these rape memories are false, no police investigation into the alleged rape accounts is necessary - no examination of physical or medical evidence, no visits to alleged crime scenes, no interviews with possible witnesses, and no checks on the reputations of the rape victims. In short, nothing will be undertaken that might support the reality of their experiences. An outrageous, even inhumane idea, of course, but analogous to the Clancy-McNally attitude to UFO abductees.<hr></blockquote> snip <blockquote>Quote:<hr>Clancy also indicts the use of hypnosis as the medium by which false memories are implanted in unsuspecting clients by unscrupulous hypnotists. The problem with this theory is that about 30% of the thousands of UFO abduction reports researchers have investigated were recalled without the use of hypnosis. Beyond that, virtually all abductees recall at least some aspects of their experiences without hypnosis. Otherwise, they would have had no reason to contact an investigator in the first place. In the light of these facts, the "hypnosis explanation" as to how "false" abduction recollections are generated also collapses. It should be added that further doubts about the efficacy of hypnosis in inducing false memories have been raised by recent experimental studies, such as the work of psychologists Steven Lynn and Irving Kirsch. They summarize their results this way: "The most appropriate conclusion that can be drawn from the evidence is that hypnosis does not reliably produce more false memories than are produced in a variety of non-hypnotic situations in which misleading information is conveyed to participants." It is also a matter of record that many hypnotherapists with no knowledge of the abduction phenomenon have, to their surprise, uncovered traumatic abduction recollections in subjects with whom they were working. In fact, Dr. Benjamin Simon, a psychiatrist highly skeptical of UFO reality who was treating Betty and Barney Hill for post traumatic stress, uncovered details of their terrifying abduction experience in what is now seen as the first systematically investigated UFO abduction case. Obviously, during hypnosis, his personal skepticism had no effect whatsoever on the Hills' recollections. There are many reasons to trust the process of hypnosis, if it is handled carefully and skeptically, with the use of false leads and other validating techniques (all of which I have discussed elsewhere). But it should be clear by now that objective science must reject Clancy's theory that hypnosis per se is implicated in the wholesale generation of false memories.<hr></blockquote>

by **Dreams End** » Wed Dec 21, 2005 3:59 pm

Bud Hopkins is what he is. Assuming he's not conning us all, he's a well meaning fellow grabbing hold of a mystery. He's not a scientist, though, and I wish there were some scientists doing the debunking of the debunking here. Hopkins is a tad too gullible for my taste. I think the whole Linda Cortile case was some kind of scam committed on Bud himself. He kept mentioning corroborating evidence and witnesses, but all of that came anonymously. If it was a scam, those other two guys were in on it with her, or maybe they were actually her controllers. I admit I'm basing this on a "feeling" about the evidence, but I read the book on that case with high expectations and I felt very deflated when I finished and didn't feel like the case had been made at all. I think he's also pretty stuck on the "hardware" approach, which I think may limit other possibilities (including the possibility that the abductions are simply mind control games being played by very human agents.) In fact, I think the facts of that particular case support the mind control ops idea...I just read a snippet (I don't know if it's in "Witnessed" or not) where one of those shady guys actually had had some sort of ongoing relationship with Linda since she was 10. There was a post sometime back (which I wish I'd bookmarked the source article) about a woman who for two years had this huge range of paranormal experiences. Most (but not all) of them were during times of sleep, though she'd find herself going into immediate deep sleep anytime she came near a particular chair. She not only had classic abduction experiences, but also many other classic experiences, such as being taken to a mysterious "school" (a la Strieber, but without aliens) and given lessons that her conscious mind couldn't recall. She never claimed to ACTUALLY be present in these places in her physical body, and the whole thing sounded like experiments with hypnotically induced experiences to some unknown end. She later ended up (I don't know how) working with one of the commercial remote viewing training companies. Forget whose it was, but definitely one of those guys hooked up to SRI. A tad off topic, I guess, but I think the mind control or perhaps other less "classical" interpretations of these experiences are called for. That said, the book Hopkins is trashing deserves to be trashed. I think victims of all sorts of trauma are pretty tired of hearing that nothing they remember is true. In fact, I'd like to ask the FMSF exactly why my own mother and my own wife DON'T remember much of their later childhood...in my wife's case, she remembers plenty BEFORE the missing years. If it's not trauma, and obviously not poor memory, what the hell is blacking out those particular years. (My wife is actually regaining some memories, WITHOUT hypnosis, thank you very much, but it is slow going...she may never remember much of what went on.). The last debunking I remember was even worse. Some dumb ass writer in a magazine was able to fool a researcher into believing she had been abducted...this somehow proved that the events aren't real. So I suppose, to continue Budd's analogy, if someone succesfully faked a police officer into believing they'd been assaulted, that would prove assaults don't happen.

by **professorpan** » Wed Dec 21, 2005 4:14 pm

I agree with your comments about Hopkins and, in particular, the Linda Cortile case. But you hit upon the reason I posted the article -- the "scientific" studies that begin with the assumption that abductions are imaginary, and proceed from there. The similarities to the way RA accounts and abduction accounts are studied and debunked are very telling.

by **Dreams End** » Wed Dec 21, 2005 5:15 pm

As is who is doing the debunking.

from Budd Hopkins re: recent abduction studies

from Budd Hopkins re: recent abduction studies

Re: from Budd Hopkins re: recent abduction studies

Re: from Budd Hopkins re: recent abduction studies

Re: from Budd Hopkins re: recent abduction studies

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