Whatever AAS is, it is certainly not just one thing. While I feel the likelihood of aliens from another planet coming here to abduct, hybridize or make contact with us to be mostly impossible, I can't rule that option out entirely. Again, looking at what these people have in common is probably the best path to take, instead of constructing wild scenarios or believing the story. Project Core offers some interesting possibilities, especially the penchant for synesthesia to be amongst this cohort. More witness studies in the future will continue to yield better options as will the lack of major abduction researchers promoting their narrative, confirming impossible stories of meeting people on ships with zero proof, not hypnotizing people nor validating fantasies of human hybrids. These experiences deserve much better.
All good points. Regressive hypnosis is hugely problematic in this area – having undergone it myself, I now understand its utility in behavioural modification through the power of suggestion, and its complete lack of utility for evidence gathering purposes in abduction research. I experienced a very powerful impulse to please the therapist by second-guessing the responses she was after. There is no place for it in abduction research IMHO.
As to the whole mental illness side of things, MUFON and Kathleen Marden are well aware of the issue, and screen, with the assistance of mental health professionals, the responses to eliminate these cases the best they can. She said as much in the interview. and there was no suggestion of it in any of the cases we have discussed in this thread. It fails as an explanation for the thousands upon thousands of people across all walks of life who report these encounters – with no background of mental illness.
At the risk of sounding like I'm seeking the last word on this topic I do want to restate that the list of things that we've raised in this discussion including - 1. cultural scripting, 2. collective unconscious, 3. synaesthesia, 4. patterned human culture - are general terms that pertain to the source, or inspiration, or material for what people recount but they are not in any sense a
mechanism that might offer any assistance in explaining what the experience is. They serve as a vague screen which allows skeptics to safely stay behind so as to avoid looking into the real question which is what actually happens during one of these experiences.
They are not an explanation for those who experience missing time after pulling over to observe a UFO, nor do they describe what happens to people undergoing waking experiences in their bed at night.
Those of us, and there are many people in the Paracast listenership included in this category, who have looked extensively across all of the areas of the paranormal for (too) many years, come to the realisation that while the categories are not closed, there appear to be a finite number of consciousness altering experiences that get regular attention from researchers and authors - amateur or otherwise. Without purporting to be an exclusive list they include things like OOBE's, time slips, lucid dreams, NDE's, DMT/ psilocybin interactions with the intelligence behind the veil, poltergeist, and trance mediumship.
Each one can be pinned, to a greater or lesser degree, to a cause (sometimes not fully understood), or to an underlying set of circumstances, that are, in some cases, replicable. You take the DMT, or train yourself to have OOBEs or lucid dreams, We trace the time slips to certain parts of the earth where they are reported more often than not, we link poltergeists to the sex, age and personality type of the experiencer - and we have numerous first hand accounts from journalists and police in attendance who have seen objects move unassisted in space.
The same can't be said of abductions. At the moment, at least to the best of my knowledge, we know of no causal mechanism behind the abduction experience save for the tenuous and controversial link to interaction with UFOs and grey aliens - which can't be a cause in any sense of the word - because the very existence of the alleged cause is yet to be proved to any scientific standard.
So in my view it stands in a category of mystery all of its own. Widely and reliably reported by very middle class and very ordinary people - the sort of people whose evidence gets accepted in court rooms everyday on more prosaic matters, very traumatic and transformative in nature, and wholly unexplained as to what causes it. Reporting these experiences is a shit sandwich - most sensible people don't until they can bear it no longer, and most do so on the basis of anonymity. Kathleen Marden, again, said as much.
My speculation, for whats its worth, and I have no expectation of vindication nor disabusal in my lifetime on the current state of UFO research, is that every day human brain-connected consciousness is the tip of the metaphorical consciousness iceberg, the spectrum of which exists wholly inaccessible to us most of the time, save for certain accident, drug or meditative induced windows. Some other intelligence (maybe part of us, maybe not - but clearly autonomous and manipulative in its own space) has access to the part that lies underwater, and interacts with a not insignificant percentage of the human population regularly for presently unknown motives.
If any part of it is true, it deserves a whole lot more attention than it gets.
