I’m guessing anyone who’s interested in the first article has read it by now. I enjoyed some of the humorous responses. Yep, it’s another one-size-fits-all explanation from the psychiatric community. They can’t seem to deal with those abductees who have conscious memory, having nothing to do with hypnosis. But some good points in it: (1) The paucity of “uninvolved witnesses” is a good point, though abduction researchers would not say there are none (but they’d have to say there are “almost none,” which isn’t good). (2) That false memories CAN be generated — i.e., there is real clinical research that verifies this (regardless of how that is transferrable to the abduction issue). To be truly scientific about it, we’d need to catch someone in the act of creating this false memory to know that it is the CAUSE of the abduction event. Without that, we have only the possibility (and it’s a reasonable one – it just needs verification).
On to the second article (just follow the link):
2. Fantastic Accounts Can Take Many Forms: False Memory Construction? Yes. Escape From Self? We Don’t Think So. By: Arndt, Jamie; Greenberg, Jeff. Psychological Inquiry, 1996, Vol. 7 Issue 2, p127, 6p; Abstract Comments on the article ‘Toward an Explanation of the UFO Abduction Phenomenon: Hypnotic Elaboration, Extraterrestrial Sadomasochism, and Spurious Memories,’ by Leonard S. Newman and Roy F. Baumeister, which appeared in the April 1996 issue of the journal ‘Psychological Inquiry.’ Implausibility of the escape-from-self explanation of UFO abduction memories.
Something else that wasn’t mentioned…if these abductees were “remembering” their abduction due to the suggestion of their hypnotherapist, wouldn’t it suggest that the hypnotherapists were the masochists instead? And what are the statistical probabilities that all of the hypnotherapists involved in this work would also happen to be masochists?
I for one am glad to see Catherine following up on the first paper…(albeit five years ago). She makes some good points that I hadn’t considered while reading the paper-
1) Hypnotherapist’s baggage? How else does the “patient” get masochistic if not for the hypno-origin of same?
2) Can all hypnotherapists be SMs?
3) It’s too easy to blame the HTs and it’s fraught with complexity and contradiction.
The abductees huge pool of data that has been amassed is the ten ton gorilla in the room. Mass masochistic self escape? How do so many patients report similar visuals while regressed. Were these thoughts implanted by MILAB? Mass media?
The blog here is a targeted effort to raise awareness of the abductee issue. Unfortunately, it is a difficult issue to embrace since the psycho-trauma endured by an empathetic christian student of the phenom is formidable (I had to put John Mack’s book down after half finishing it) .
Perhaps the greatest contamination of the profession’s data (the papers) is the self-conscious component that has each pro circumspect about the peer perceptions on the matter. The point was very well made in the first paper that “For many reasons, we find the “extraterrestrial hypothesis” difficult to accept. Not least among them is the illogical, irrational, and internally contradictory nature of many UFO abduction stories.”
Agreed on the mixed data and mixed conclusions (or conclusiveness). See my earlier reply and my FAQ page.