@jjflash: Thanks, reading about Jacobs not welcoming different data is very welcome and enlightening. It evens out the picture somewhat. But on the other hand, I can't escape the conclusion that Goertzel's research also has certain problems. I'd like to know by what criteria is someone deemed a cryptoamneziac. How do you measure that someone is recollecting false memory and not something which really happened? I mean, most of the tests I'd stumble upon would be based upon word lists and other mundane stuff. While it's certainly plausible that someone might mix up the names of birds in an experiment, I find it less plausible that someone would falsely remember a vivid and horrifying experience which also includes a strong emotional response.
Let's try to keep this in proper context, please, Elendil: Goertzel's article addressed the work his class at Rutgers did in specific reference to the now infamous Bigelow-funded Roper Poll authored by Hopkins, Jacobs and Westrum. Goertzel did not address specific recollections related to vivid and horrifying experiences. More on the poll:
Abduction by Aliens or Sleep Paralysis? (Skeptical)
Susan Blackmore, Skeptical Inquirer Magazine, May/June 1998
...The claim that 3.7 million Americans have been abducted was based on a Roper Poll conducted between July and September 1991 and published in 1992. The authors were Budd Hopkins, a painter and sculptor; David Jacobs, a historian; and Ron Westrum, a sociologist (Hopkins, Jacobs, and Westrum 1992)...
The Roper Organization provides a service for other questions to be tacked on to their own regular polls. In this case, 5,947 adults (a representative sample) were given a card listing eleven experiences and were asked to say whether each had happened to them more than twice, once or twice, or never. The experiences (and percentage of respondents reporting having had the experience at least once) included: seeing a ghost (11 percent), seeing and dreaming about UFOs (7 percent and 5 percent), and leaving the body (14 percent). Most important were the five "indicator experiences": 1) "Waking up paralyzed with a sense of a strange person or presence or something else in the room" (18 percent); 2) "Feeling that you were actually flying through the air although you didn't know why or how" (10 percent); 3) "Experiencing a period of time of an hour or more, in which you were apparently lost, but you could not remember why, or where you had been" (13 percent); 4) "Seeing unusual lights or balls of light in a room without knowing what was causing them, or where they came from" (8 percent); and 5) "Finding puzzling scars on your body and neither you nor anyone else remembering how you received them or where you got them" (8 percent).
The authors decided that "when a respondent answers `yes' to at least four of these five indicator questions, there is a strong possibility that individual is a UFO abductee." The only justification given is that Hopkins and Jacobs worked with nearly five hundred abductees over a period of seventeen years. They noticed that many of their abductees reported these experiences and jumped to the conclusion that people who have four or more of the experiences are likely to be abductees.
From there, the stunning conclusion of the Roper Poll was reached. Out of the 5,947 people interviewed, 119 (or 2 percent) had four or five of the indicators. Since the population represented by the sample was 185 million, the total number was 3.7 million -- hence the conclusion that nearly four million Americans have been abducted by aliens.
Why did they not simply ask a question like, "Have you ever been abducted by aliens?"? They argue that this would not reveal the true extent of abduction experiences since many people only remember them after therapy or hypnosis. If abductions really occur, this argument may be valid. However, the strategy used in the Roper Poll does not solve the problem.
With some exceptions, many scientists have chosen to ignore the poll because it is so obviously flawed. However, because its major claim has received such wide publicity, I decided a little further investigation was worthwhile.
Full article:
http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc817.htm
So, Elendil and others, Blackmore's article provides us with some context of the questions contained in the Roper Poll. People were not asked about vivid and horrifying experiences, as you presented for consideration, Elendil. Poll participants were qualified as being alien abductees based on responses to a survey that never so much as informed them they were being polled about aline abduction... which brings us back to Goertzel's article, as it relates to Elendil's question, "How do you measure that someone is recollecting false memory and not something which really happened?".
Please note that among other ways Goertzel explained his research findings, he specifically referenced the work of Dawes and Mulford (at the University of Oregon):
"This conclusion is also strongly supported by Dawes and Mulford's (1993) innovative study at the University of Oregon which demonstrated that the dual nature of Hopkins, Jacobs and Westrum's first item, which asked about waking up paralyzed
and about sensing a strange person in the room in the
same item, actually led to an
increased recollection of unusual phenomena as compared to a properly constructed single-issue survey item. Textbooks on questionnaire writing universally warn against 'double-barreled' questions of this sort because they are known to give bad results. Dawes and Mulford confirm this and further offer the explanation that the combination of the two issues in one item causes a conjunction effect in memory which increases the likelihood of false recollection."
More specifically and may be viewed through the link provided below, Dawes and Mulford confirmed conjunction effect in memory as follows:
...in supporting a conclusion that post-traumatic stress from kidnapping by aliens is a major mental-health problem in this country (allegedly affecting at least 2 percent of the population),
Hopkins and Jacobs (1992) cite the rate of affirmative responses to a recent Roper Poll question: "How often has this happened to you: Waking up paralyzed with a sense of a strange person or presence or something in the room ?" Their rationale for considering affirmative responses
particularly diagnostic of alien kidnapping involves the conjunction of the two components in the question...
As part of a (much) larger study, we asked that same Roper Poll question of 144 subjects (mainly University of Oregon students and some townspeople interested in the $20 pay for two hours). Forty percent answered that this had happened to them at least once. A randomly selected control group of 144 subjects in the same study were asked simply how often they remembered waking up paralyzed. Only 14 percent answered that this had happened to them at least once...
Thus, due to a conjunction effect in memory, the added phrase "with a sense of a strange person or presence . . . in the room" actually "broadens the scope" of the question, rather than narrowing it.
Hopkins and Jacobs are, of course, correct in maintaining that the additional phrase _should_ "narrow the scope." It's just that the phrase doesn't. What they have discovered, therefore, is not evidence of alien kidnappings, but of a common irrationality in the way we recall our lives.
http://skepticfiles.org/ufo2/memtrick.htm
To try to clarify even further, it is not possible that the sample of recollections be accurate when just 14% reported recalling waking up paralyzed (when the question is posed singularly), while 40% - nealry 3 times as many - reportedly recall waking up paralyzed
and sensing a presence in the room (when the question is posed in a conjuntive manner). Dawes and Mulford therefore further established (as was already accepted within the professional research community) that the conjunctive question is, in fact, leading. Furthermore, Goertzel was indeed correct in his evaluation that this tactic at best showed incompetence and a lack of fundamental knowledge on behalf of the authors (Jacobs, Hopkins and Westrum) of the survey, and at worst intentional deception.
