Let's Put An End To Abductions Once And For All

[Miah]

I also hate how so many of these abductees are also way out their in their views in general, most of them are fruity and not especially intelligent. I also despise how they talk as though they are in some special "I was abducted" club, as if anyone else has not right to talk about the subject.

I just think you're an ignorant fuckin jerk who hasn't bothered to look at data collected by alot of researchers over the years. People with the experience tend to have average to above average IQs, and come from every walk of life (not just the fruity ones). If we're "way out in our views", then you're just as way out...you're here spewing crap you have no idea about and haven't bothered to even look. (thats glaringly obvious)

I don't personally know anyone who acts like it's a special club, but for me it's the exact opposite. I didn't ask for it, I didn't want it, and there's sure nothing special about me. I'm confident there's plenty more who feel like I do, because I've actually spoken to them.

Every facet of this subject has it's lunatics, I'll thank you to kindly not lump us all together.

If you wanted a reaction, you got it. Now go do some actual reading on the subject so you sound like someone with a brain.

Jeff, let me start by saying that I have a TON of respect for you, and I apologize if you misread that as attack on YOU, or ALL supposed abductees for that matter. It was clearly not, read: "so many".

The problem is that you are in the far minority of those who claim abduction. The majority are fruit loops, and I don't apologize for saying so. Just look at the Sleepers and others on ATS. I figured you would be the first to agree with me on this.

These particular types act as though my research into the subject has no bearing since I have not personally been abducted, which is bullshit.

 

[jritzmann]

Micah-
The majority, as you call it doesn't even speak openly in public about such things. The people you call "loony", are a very small minority of wanna-bees, and/or people who simply don't fit into any clique or group, nor community. They're lonely people looking for acceptance, and meaning.

I also have to point out there was one woman I spoke about (I think) on the show, that although was completely in need of psych help (and nobody including me believed her abduction tales), when she was finally committed, her neighbors reported UFOs over her house which culminated in a pretty horrific tandem experience for them.

She was legit. I have no doubt. But in literal terms, mentally incapable of dealing. At all.

I agree with you (and I'm sorry for the knee jerk reaction), and I hate the wannabes as much as the next guy. They make us look like morons, and heavily contributed to the subject being "fringe" when it isn't as much as one thinks. Alot of these people have also been duped by so called "therapists".

I'm sorry, but I do believe you painted that post with a wide inaccurate brush (and again I apologize for snapping you're neck...I'm funny that way when it comes to perceived name calling and belittlement regarding experiencers as a whole), but you're right in the sense of the *publicly* speaking experiencers.

 

[DBTrek]

I just think you're an ignorant fuckin jerk who hasn't bothered to look at data collected by alot of researchers over the years. People with the experience tend to have average to above average IQs, and come from every walk of life (not just the fruity ones).

Too funny!

Where else have I heard something like this. Let me take a walk down memory lane:

1988: Thirteen years old, I'm comiserating with my fellow D&D nerds about how the christian right persecutes people who play Dungeons & Dragons (with a healthy portion of teenage angst). "Yeah" my friend says, "Christians are dumb. In fact, there are studies that show D&D players have above average intelligence! We're waaay smarter than the Jesus freaks!"

1999: Sitting in a college apartment playing my 20th straight hour of Everquest while shovelling Taco Bell in to my mouth. The other players in my guild are grumbling about a news article that says a kid has committed suicide because of problems he had with people in Everquest. My fellow lard-laden MMORPG players are indignant. One of them states "Just like the media to demonize what they don't understand. We're not morons. They should do a google search, they'd see that MMORPG players have above average intelligence."

2007: One of my friends self-diagnosis himself with Aspergers Syndrome. He joins a forum called 'Wrong Planet', a place where other people who have (or believe they have) Aspergers congregate. The forum is full of threads about how difficult life is for people with Aspergers, and how all the Neurotypicals (aka non-Aspergers people) can't possibly understand the trials they face. One of the few satisfactions they draw from life is the smug self assurence that people with Aspergers have above average intelligence!

My experience has been that people who fall back on the 'above average intelligence' argument are generally nerds with inferiority complexes. If someone TRULY has above average intelligence they should be able to demonstrate that through action. Having to announce that you have above average intelligence is pretty much the same as admitting that you don't.

 

[Miah]

Micah-
The majority, as you call it doesn't even speak openly in public about such things. The people you call "loony", are a very small minority of wanna-bees, and/or people who simply don't fit into any clique or group, nor community. They're lonely people looking for acceptance, and meaning.
...but you're right in the sense of the *publicly* speaking experiencers.

Well there is something I did not take into consideration, that the majority of REAL abductees may in fact not be the voices that I hear most prevalently as they are not talking about it. I doubt most of them are on ATS

Thanks for correcting my view on that, and apology accepted.

 

[musictomyears]

Well there is something I did not take into consideration, that the majority of REAL abductees may in fact not be the voices that I hear most prevalently as they are not talking about it.

You can take that to the bank. Why, do you think, do most people even here post anonymously? Because they know what's going to happen if they attach their names to "alien abductions and flying saucers": Off they go into the loony bin, no further questions asked.

There are some high-powered business people who have told me the wildest stuff about their own UFO encounters, and the beliefs they base on them. These people would never, in million years, go public.

 

[Poi]

Yeah, a friend of mine finally admitted to something akin to abduction. He's in his sixties, is quite prominent within his professional community and he ain't talkin'. He's asked me to forget what he said and clammed up again long before I got much more information from him. I got only enough to make my hair stand on end. Out of respect, I don't ask him questions anymore.

Guess I feel sorry for people who can't talk about their experiences. Must be a rather lonely position.

 

[DBTrek]

I tend to think that millions of Americans aren't being secretly scooped up by flying alien spacecraft. There are several alternative explainations that seem far more plasible and don't require us to believe in beings of extraordinary and supernatural power.

For example: http://www.ufodigest.com/abducted.html

"Elizabeth Loftus, the much-acclaimed psychologist at the University of California-Irvine who successfully debunked the theory of repressed memory, said television "gives visual plausibility to an abduction explanation" for any number of things -- nightmares, moles on our skin, loneliness, sexual abnormalities. People simply want to understand why they are experiencing some abnormal, frightening or confusing things.

In the 1980s, those same symptoms were typically explained away as "suddenly remembered sexual abuse," she said. It depended, she said, on which kind of therapist was consulted.

"If you were steered to a satanic therapist, it was Satan doing it," she said. "If you went to an alien-abductionist therapist, it was the aliens. If you went to a therapist who believed everything stemmed from forgotten child or sexual abuse, bingo, that was it."

Loftus, who has served as an expert witness on many such cases, has proved in the laboratory that such memories can be implanted. The problem in those cases, she says, is that there is no evidence that any of that -- the alien abduction, the sexual abuse, the satanic visitation -- ever occurred. (No doubt, she said, tragic and horrible sexual abuse does occur, but rather than being repressed, it is vividly remembered. The kind that needs to be "suggested" to a patient is something else altogether.)"

There have been demon possession/satanic cult stories that parallel alien abduction accounts in almost every respect (except for the supernatural perpetrators). To me, this indicates that there's something about human psychology that causes people to reach for any explaination (no matter how bizzare) to explain the unexplainable. Historically we've had gods, spirits, and witchcraft. Alien abductions seem to be the latest incarnation of this long-established trend of fantastic forces acting directly upon mankind. If, sometime far in the future, we meet ET's and start interacting with them we'll have to innovate a new supernatural culprit to explain the unexplainable.

That's not to say that I think people who claim abduction experiences are trying to deceive us. I suspect they've experienced something and the abduction scenario seems to make the most sense when they try to understand it. Having no hard evidence of anything actually having taken place blaming aliens with untraceable technology offers a possible explaination, and that's what people want.

 

[spookyparadigm]

My experience has been that people who fall back on the 'above average intelligence' argument are generally nerds with inferiority complexes. If someone TRULY has above average intelligence they should be able to demonstrate that through action. Having to announce that you have above average intelligence is pretty much the same as admitting that you don't.

I don't know about above-average intelligence, but abductees have above-average education.

From Chris Bader's article

Supernatural Support Groups: Who are the UFO Abductees and Ritual Abuse Survivors? - Christopher D. Bader

http://www.nidsci.org/articles/abductees.php

His survey size is small (51 abductees), but 68% have some college education, vs. 46.1% of the general American populace.

 

[DBTrek]

I don't know about above-average intelligence, but abductees have above-average education.

From Chris Bader's article

Supernatural Support Groups: Who are the UFO Abductees and Ritual Abuse Survivors? - Christopher D. Bader

http://www.nidsci.org/articles/abductees.php

His survey size is small (51 abductees), but 68% have some college education, vs. 46.1% of the general American populace.

You see what I'm saying then, right? What is 68% of 51 people? By my calculation that's 34.68 people. Rounding it up to a full 35 people we're forced to ask ourselves if that's really a significant representation of the 3.5 million people that claim to have been abducted.

I would lean towards 'no' on that one.

Plus we have the problem of quantifying what intelligence actually is (though the phrase that set me off mentioned IQ, which is quantifiable).

My point is, and it wasn't aimed at Jeff it was aimed at the phrase, throughout life every time I've encountered someone citing themselves as belonging to a group of 'above average intelligence' it's been a nerd with an insecurity problem. They're under scrutiny for something or another and instead of simply addressing the issue they wheel out this pseudo-scientific version of "I'm smarter than you so don't question me".

That's all I was trying to encapsulate in that rant. If you're smarter than me, then prove it through argument and reason. Don't try to halt discussion or silence opposition by inferring that you're too smart to be questioned. Especially when you're supporting that assertion with some half-baked story about how people like you are smarter than the average man. That's all I was getting at.

 

[spookyparadigm]

People with interest in the UFO subject, be they passive believers or members of ufo groups, do have higher education levels (note, that's education, not intelligence) than the populace as a whole. That has been repeatedly shown with larger sample sizes (Denzler's work comes to mind immediately, but there are a number of others, either done as sociology/anthropology/psychological study, or simply polls). Bader's article has the first demographics I am aware of on specifically abductees.

Rather than pontificate, I prefer to actually learn and advance from data.

 

[spookyparadigm]

Also, DBTrek, if you read the article I linked to, it notes that there are substantial differences between ritual satanic abuse cases and alien abduction cases. For example, the prevalence of multiple personality disorder in satanic abuse cases, the substantially different demographics (gender, relationship status, profession, income), etc.

They're not the same phenomenon. The transformation of hypnotic sessions by ideologically-bent therapists/interpreters/authors might be related, but it's not the same phenomenon.

 

[spookyparadigm]

BTW, please note that Bader's article did end up getting peer-reviewed and published in

Bader, Christopher
2003 Supernatural Support Groups: Who are the UFO Abductees and Ritual Abuse Survivors? Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 42(4): 669 - 678.

 

[Miah]

spookyparadigm needs to find the Edit button...

 

[DBTrek]

BTW, please note that Bader's article did end up getting peer-reviewed and published in

Bader, Christopher
2003 Supernatural Support Groups: Who are the UFO Abductees and Ritual Abuse Survivors? Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 42(4): 669 - 678.

Let's take a closer look at that.

I've never heard of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion so I decided to google it. I could not find any reference to it being a peer-review publication, nor any indication of who the peers would be. The description of the publication said:

"The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, the quarterly publication of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, has published provocative research for over forty years. Drawing on a rich interdisciplinary cross-section of scholarship -- including religion, sociology, political science, and psychology -- the journal offers perspectives on national and international issues such as brainwashing and cults, religious persecution, and right wing authoritarianism. The journal is an exciting and timely publication to keep readers current with the role and impact of religion in today's world."
(From: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0021-8294&site=1)

Not exactly Scientific American there eh? A study based on surveying less than sixty people published in this questionable journal doesn't impress me as having much authority.

 

[Aaron LeClair]

I also hate how so many of these abductees are also way out their in their views in general, most of them are fruity and not especially intelligent. I also despise how they talk as though they are in some special "I was abducted" club, as if anyone else has not right to talk about the subject.

Switch abductees with the word contactees and you'll be more accurate.

 

[Miah]

I also hate how so many of these abductees are also way out their in their views in general, most of them are fruity and not especially intelligent. I also despise how they talk as though they are in some special "I was abducted" club, as if anyone else has not right to talk about the subject.

Switch abductees with the word contactees and you'll be more accurate.

Same ilk, but you're right that would cover more of them.

 

[valiens]

So you're saying that an advanced being that can control space/time in ways we haven't figured out cannot find the "off" switch on a camera?

We're talking about beings that shut down nuclear missiles for shits and giggles.

No offense, but every "abductee" I have spoken to about trying to bust 'them' say the same BS about how it won't work, but they never REALLY tried it. That is quite suspect. Have you?

There are great cameras that you can hide in anything that are triggered by motion if needed. And if one was run every night all night to a remote PC hard drive, you would know something happened even if the camera just went blank for a bit. And if that happened, you would rearrange, and try something else, like cameras all over the premesis.

If I truly believed that I was being abducted, you can bet every penney of my money would be spent in busting them in the act and letting the world know.

No. If you want to pay me for that setup I'd be glad to do it. I did toy with the idea of setting up a webcam and maybe hook it up to UFO Magazine's website as like a dollar PPV thing. Monitor me while I sleep. lol.

Someone will probably steal that now, but...no, I'm not so obsessed with "catching them in the act" anymore. When I was in high school I used to set tripwires by the door.

The problem is it could be ten minutes or ten years from now (or never again) before the next abduction. I'm not buying a bunch of equipment on the bet that they'll be here before it breaks down.

 

[valiens]

But I personally have a problem with anyone who makes these outrageous claims without proof and will give you all the reasons in the world why not to try to do anything about it. That is disingenuous.

I have a problem with the "do something about it," part. It implies that we all want this to go away or trap them in the act like criminals. I'm sure some do, but I don't. I want to know the truth of it to the best of my ability to comprehend what's taking place.

I also hate how so many of these abductees are also way out their in
their views in general, most of them are fruity and not especially intelligent.

Me too. But then the question is, are they (we) delusional and so have attached ourselves to this subject or did this interaction make them/us that way by blurring the line between what is possible and what's not so badly that our lack of discernment bleeds over into other areas?

I also despise how they talk as though they are in some special "I was abducted" club, as if anyone else has not right to talk about the subject.

I haven't seen this but I'd agree if I did. But this type of thing swings both ways. I'm sick of people talking about what abductees are as if we're not in the room. Whether someone thinks it's a psychological dysfunction, a lie, or temporal lobe anomalies has zero relationship to the actual experiencing of this and how it shapes our lives.

Oh great. I'm a liar? That's fine. Rest easy tonight. That doesn't change the fact that I won't because I'm not. It's epilepsy? Fantastic. Rest easy. I won't because it continues to unfold with the same feeling and structure to it as any real relationship with real beings. I was molested and now I've traded the molester for aliens because that's too difficult to deal with, so aliens are somehow...better? Are YOU insane?

--that type of thing is irksome.

EDIT: I just realized I have seen the "abductee club" mentality just recently at another message board. I properly chastised him, though, and am inclined to believe that blowhard abductees are like any other hard blowers: Full of air. In direct conflict with everything I've said, I do think many "abductees" who I've met are completely full of crap. It's like UFO sightings: 90% are explainable in pedestrian terms.

 

[Miah]

EDIT: I just realized I have seen the "abductee club" mentality just recently at another message board. I properly chastised him, though, and am inclined to believe that blowhard abductees are like any other hard blowers: Full of air. In direct conflict with everything I've said, I do think many "abductees" who I've met are completely full of crap. It's like UFO sightings: 90% are explainable in pedestrian terms.

Something about just being in this forum and listening to this webcast gives you more credibility already.

Obviously this may not have been directed at you, but speaking in general as I clarified with Jeff.

Great idea on the live feed to UFO mag btw, and it brings up a good point; don't worry about the money you spend to catch them in the act, consider it an investment. There's plenty of money to be made on the video/pics in the long run!

 

[spookyparadigm]

BTW, please note that Bader's article did end up getting peer-reviewed and published in

Bader, Christopher
2003 Supernatural Support Groups: Who are the UFO Abductees and Ritual Abuse Survivors? Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 42(4): 669 - 678.

Let's take a closer look at that.

I've never heard of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion so I decided to google it. I could not find any reference to it being a peer-review publication, nor any indication of who the peers would be. The description of the publication said:

"The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, the quarterly publication of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, has published provocative research for over forty years. Drawing on a rich interdisciplinary cross-section of scholarship -- including religion, sociology, political science, and psychology -- the journal offers perspectives on national and international issues such as brainwashing and cults, religious persecution, and right wing authoritarianism. The journal is an exciting and timely publication to keep readers current with the role and impact of religion in today's world."
(From: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0021-8294&site=1)

Not exactly Scientific American there eh? A study based on surveying less than sixty people published in this questionable journal doesn't impress me as having much authority.

It is peer reviewed (note the discussion of reviewers, and the need for four copies, a standard practice for peer reviewed journals), and the editor contact info is on their website.

http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/submit.asp?ref=0021-8294&site=1