Chapter 4/5

Thoughts on Abductions by Bill

 E.Budd

Ufology, especially abduction phenomena, is like camping out in the local campground. We all have our separate tents constructed, and woe be to those who would wander into anyone else's site. "Stick to your own spot and leave those other folks alone....they're not like us." Why? Because we're camping here, hey're camping THERE! (...and man, do we ever smash those bastards from nearby camps if they mistakenly wander into ours....)

I suspect my experiences to be real, in so far as I can judge any reality at all, and let's assume, for a moment at least, that they are. And let's all be honest and serious for a minute while we're at it. I simply can't put the total experience in a box and label it as the campground mentality would have me. The other problem is that neither can anyone else. NOBODY! But in a rush to be taken seriously and have mainstream science invested on their side, some researchers and abductees alike, have constructed a folklore of their own, albeit, a scientific one.

Email lists feature one or two articles a day on the application of science to the abduction phenomena. It doesn't matter what list -- the articles containing personal statements of the need for a cold, hard, objective examination of abduction evidence pop up. They are usually accompanied by follow up statements on throwing the "kooks" out of Ufology. "Get rid of the charlatans, the new-agers, the religious nuts, and the weak-minded -- those that must prop themselves up with what they imagine the phenomena to be, rather than what it is." Boy, does that make you sound like a no nonsense, scientist or what? (And by the way, the progenitors of these types of letters have usually, and I stress the word 'usually,' not experienced abduction for themselves.) That's a great idea. I agree. Let's throw those phony bastards out. Now...who are they? Please identify them. PLEASE?!

"Well," the abduction scientist might say, "they are those who don't apply the scientific method to the question of abduction." What scientific method? I wish someone would apply it for me and show me how it works in this arena. Listen. Do yourself a favor and talk to an abductee (whoever the hell you think they are). Get past the initial descriptions, their thrill and or fear at discovery, and their feelings of relief when they hear someone else seemingly confirm details. Now, ask them what they feel the experience was all about. What is the truth of their experience? The truth is, they don't know. When you get them in a private situation, their stories differ somewhat from what they publicly admit to - say, on a web site for instance. "C'mon, tell us what you REALLY think." Do those who define the experience with all the physicality and tangibility of a trip to the grocery store admit there were elements about the abduction that lacked that physicality? Sure. Do those who describe it as a spiritual or religious experience also admit that they, "caught an alien rod up their ass?" Sure.

If you really probe deeply enough into someone's experience, they usually admit - or it becomes very clear - they just don't know what the hell happened to them. Instead, they "sort" their own data. They're obviously confused about the totality of their experience. Their details sometimes conflict. Their feelings about their encounter don't jive with what they think they should be. Do I represent any exception to this confusion...any clarity? Hell no. And this has been equally true for every abductee I've ever corresponded with - and there have been many.

So, they obviously need help, right? They need an independent, objective third party to identify the experience for them...some scientist, right? They need someone who can cut through the conflicting details and come to some conclusions...right?

David Jacobs applies a scientific method of sorts. And he's the best -- everybody says so. I zoomed into his site a few years ago and read his article, "Thinking Clearly About the Abduction Phenomena." Great, I thought. At last...someone thinking clearly about this subject.

The first thing Jacobs tells us is that we don't know the truth of our own experience. He does, however. Why? How? Through hypnosis and application of common sense, he is able to distinguish the reality from our own self induced fiction. But understand how Jacobs views his own work. First, he must rely on the worst kind of evidence for his research. He relies on anecdotal evidence..."what people say." Then he keeps his data to himself - no independent and objective third party is needed, right? No peer review is necessary, right? After all, he's a scientist, applying the scientific method. To be fair, Jacobs claims that any exchange of evidence would threaten the anonymity of his clients.

Jacobs uses hypnosis also in order to 'enhance' what abductees say. Under hypnosis, abductees invariably report the same things; a core of experience that never varies. We don't exactly know what these "core experiences" are, because he won't share his data, but they never vary...right? Wrong. They vary all the time. The edge becomes the middle as new core experiences emerge from Jacobs research all the time. But, back to hypnosis.
The theory is we all remember everything we ever experience, and all we need is a method by which to dredge it all up. Is hypnosis that method? Boy, I didn't know. So...I asked. I asked someone who rigorously defends hypnosis and Jacob's techniques all over the web. He, more than anyone I know, applies the scientific method to his arguments and views, and comes down on the side of David Jacobs and the abduction hypothesis. I had gotten close to this "expert" over a period of years. I considered him, and still do, a good friend. I had a chance to ask him my questions face to face. So, I asked him as a friend might. I asked, "Hey, with all you've said and seen about hypnosis and abduction, just tell me this...does hypnosis work? Is it real? Can it do as advertised? ...and let me look you in the eye while you answer."

His response? ...pause...stammer...(apologetic expression? I couldn't tell)..."I don't know," he says.

Done.

Truth.

He doesn't know.

Could it be that people under hypnosis, abductees included, only talk about what they deem acceptable to the researcher? Could it be that the researcher himself only deems "abduction" to be that which seems most acceptable to himself? Could it be that those staunchest defenders of the scientific method in abduction research have no real science at all to back them up?

Yep...to all three of those statements. Its bleak.

Further, I think something even more cynical is beginning to occur. I believe Nuts and Boltsers are deliberately hiding elements of their own abductions that might seem "too edgy" for most (even those who somewhat accept the abduction phenomena) in order to attract study by mainstream science. They change the phenomena to make it more acceptable -- 'believable,' I guess is the word. I understand the reasoning, and I understand the politics. I assume the hope is that as soon as mainstreamers begin to take the phenomena seriously enough to look at it, we'll pop out of the closet on them. This is a mistake. It adds to the confusion, vitriol and polemics now, while mainstreamers may never enter the equation at all anyway.

So, we have armed camps in Ufology, all blabbing about the scientific method, all blabbing that they own the truth, and none of them knowing what the fuck they're talking about. Star children frown and sadly shake their heads at the nuts and bolts advocates...""They are incapable of knowing the truth." Nuts and bolts advocates shake their fists at the star children..."They are too weak to recognize and accept reality."

This wouldn't be so bad, if the reality of the abduction phenomena in general wasn't hurt by all this. Some of us are less interested in joining a camp than we are in wanting to know what is really going on. We're missing it while this garbage rolls over all of us. It's time to admit that even those who were first to defend the reality of abduction could be holding us back. It's time to ignore the skeptics for a while, pool our data, get rid of the armed camp mentality, roll up our sleeves and find out what's happening to us -- all of us.

First, however, we've got to admit we don't know the first thing about the phenomena. It could be something much more pervasive, sweeping and enormous than any of us are prepared to admit.
 

Chapter 5

Extraordinary Claim? Move the Goal Posts! by

Patrick Huyghe

 Patrick Huyghe is the author of Swamp Gas Times (Paraview Press) a fascinating autobiographical memoir (by a journalist who has covered the UFO field for more than twenty years. This honest behind-the-scenes look at how the media handle UFO stories also examines the dramatic events and major players that have transformed UFO research in the past quarter century.

If you've heard it once, you've no doubt heard it a million times. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." That old saw has become the skeptic's number one attack against claims that threaten to overturn their cherished applecarts. And it's a good one, for one simple reason: they're right. 

But behind this squabbling over the would-be extraordinary, some rather starling back-room maneuvering may take place. As the arguments fly over what exactly constitutes the necessary proof, there's some hasty rewriting of the rules of the game. For the would-be extraordinary, for the unorthodox claim on the verge of scientific success, the ground rules are gratefully changed. This practice, often referred to as "Moving the Goal Posts," is an extraordinary phenomenon in itself, and here's the way it happens in science. I'll illustrate this with two examples, one from the field of geophysics, the other from linguistics, but the same phenomenon can be found in a host of less orthodox disciplines, such as parapsychology.

I'll begin with the geophysics example, because I am intimately familiar with the details of the controversy in question. It just so happens that I helped the scientist involved write a book on the subject. The book, called The Big Splash (Birch Lane Press, 1990), involves Louis Frank. Frank is a physicist at the University of Iowa and highly respected member of the space science community. In1986 he found evidence in satellite images that Earth was being bombarded by about twenty house-sized comets per minute. These ice comets are so small, he said, that they break up and turn to water in the upper atmosphere. And over the age of the Earth, Frank reasoned, these incoming small comets would be responsible for all the water in our oceans and then some.

The astronomer's response to Frank's discovery was not unexpected. "If these things exist," they said, "we would have seen them." Of course, astronomers really had never considered that comets could be so small, as they normally measure comets in kilometres. Nor had they ever conducted a search of near-Earth objects that might have revealed the existence of such small, dark, incoming objects. But never mind, astronomers had no interest in searching for these objects because they knew the outcome in advance.

One physicist, however, decided to prove Frank wrong the old fashioned way - by conducting a telescopic search. The physicist's name was Clayne Yeats. In the late 1980s he worked as the project manager of the Galileo mission for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. Yeates, who has since passed away, obtained funding from JPL and rented the Spacewatch Telescope at Kitt Peak run by the University of Arizona. A search conducted in January of 1988 produced some stunning results - actual images of the small comets.

When the images were presented to scientists at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union a few months later, however, many were unconvinced. They thought the so-called small comet streaks in the images were merely noise - fluctuations in the data due to chance.The standard of proof in astronomy is to have two images of the same object. When Yeates wrote up a paper announcing the results of his search, the editor of Geophysical Research Letters informed him that "for your paper to be accepted for publication, the referees must be convinced that you have seen the same object in two consecutive exposures."

As it turned out, Yeates had already conducted a search and had obtained just that - two consecutive images of the same object. In fact he had six pairs of images. Yeates then provided the editor of Geophysical Research Letters with a pair of successive exposures that showed the same object. But when the referees of Yeates' paper saw the double images, they must have been taken aback, for they decided to change the rules of astronomy just for him.

Despite having met the editor's requirements of proof, Yeates' paper was rejected. One of the referees said that three consecutive images of the same object were needed for him to believe the streaks were not noise. Yeates was angry and rightfully so. It seems as if suddenly astronomers now randomly decided that three were necessary. But if Yeates had then produced three, surely astronomers would have asked for four. And then if he had four, they would have wanted five.

This was my first encounter with a blatant example of "moving the goal posts." I've witnessed many other examples since then, most recently in a bitter controversy taking place in linguistics about whether chimps can really learn to use language.

A decade and a half ago, the claims of animal language researchers were discredited as exaggerated self-delusion. The critics insisted that such claims were merely exercises in wishful thinking. You can train animals to do all kinds of animals things, they said, like teaching bears to ride motorcycles. They said that the chimps had learned nothing more sophisticated than how to press the right buttons or make the right utterances in order to get humans to cough up those much-loved bananas.

There is no evidence, the critics concluded before slamming the door shut on the subject in the early '80s, that the chimp utterances even remotely resembled the linguistic abilities of a young child.

But recent research by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and other scientists at at the Language Research Center at Georgia State University in Atlanta appears to refute that view. Her pigmy chimps, which some scientists believe are more intelligent than the common chimpanzees studied in the earlier "flawed" language experiments, appear to have learned to understand complex sentences and seem to use symbolic language to communicate spontaneously.

Her chimpanzees demonstrate the rudimentary comprehensive skills of children aged between two and three years of age.

The critics will have none of this, of course. And all the claimants can do is shake their heads in frustration. Stuart Shanker, a philosopher at York University in Toronto and a co-author with Savage-Rumbaugh on a new book, insists that linguists are applying a double standard to this new work. The critics are dismissing skills like putting together a noun and a verb to form a two-word sentence which they would consider nascent linguistic ability is seen in a young child. "the linguists kept upping their demands and (just as in the case of UFO evidence -ED) and Sue kept meeting their demands," Shanker told George Johnson of the New York Times in a story that appeared on june 6th, 1995, " that the linguists keep moving the goal posts," and appeared to be quite familiar, not to mention frustrated, by this practice.

Extraordinary proof often seems to mean a change of the basic rules of the game, a change in the standards of proof. An interesting feature of this human-group "reality game" is that the rules appear to change as the game is being played. All of which gives a truly extraordinary meaning to the phrase "extraordinary proof," the word "extraordinary" relating more to the nature of the game rather its substance, which appears to play a secondary role.
Extraordinary indeed!

Chapter 6 click here