Clancy is bracing for a fresh round of hate mail once her book, "Abducted: How People Come To Believe They Were Kidnapped By Aliens," is published by Harvard University Press later this month.
Those who believe aliens are among us haven't taken kindly to her theory that abductees have created "false memories" out of, she writes, a "blend of fantasy-proneness, memory distortion, culturally available scripts, sleep hallucinations, and scientific illiteracy."
(Via The Anomalist.)
I sympathize, but I don't necessarily agree. While sleep paralysis and fantasy-prone personalities certainly account for a sizeable bulk of abduction accounts, they fail to address the complexity of the phenomenon.
For example, ufologists repeatedly tell us of inexplicable "missing" pregnancies -- ostensibly the work of alien gynecologists working to create a strain of human-ET hybrids. If something even vaguely like this is occurring, an extraordinary investigation is urgently needed. Unallied researchers should be able to peruse medical documents and "abductees" should have a means of reporting their experiences that guarantees complete anonymity. (The prospect of anonymity, while not without its share of problems, should at least help stifle bogus reports by attention-seekers.)
If otherworldly beings are indeed "kidnapping" human subjects on the scale suggested by investigators such as Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs, then we can only hope to address a slender portion of the enigma. But if abductions are much rarer, which seems likelier, it should be within our ability to mount a systematic study that integrates oral recollection with verifiable medical anomaly in an effort to seek meaningful correlations.
Thus far, this approach has been forsaken in favor of fulfilling the various belief systems that have infected the UFO "research" culture -- which has grown to encompass mainstream skeptics. Sadly, I see no obvious way out of this intellectual cul-de-sac.
6 comments:
Mac:
The key word in your comments is "if."
I would like to think that Clancy's book would get a fair hearing, but...
Well, it is ufology after all.
Folks interested in the subject might want to read The Abduction Enigma, by Kevin Randle, William Cone and Russ Estes. It presents a pretty damning critique of abduction researchers.
Paul
Are you suggesting that some people are getting left behind? Is this one of those Christian "What Would Jesus Blog?" blogs?
How far to the left do you have to pretend to be if you are that far over on the right? I bet you wipe with your right hand. Which hand do you hold chopsticxks in? How do you eat ice cream? With your tongue?
What would djew say now? Jesus Christ?
Lorie
Arkansas USA
Hi Mac -
Clancy's error is to claim she is a scientist and then to display a brazen lack of scientific open-mindedness.
A failure to find evidence should never trump an open mind.
She should express her skepticism, but not pass judgment on the issue.
For all her reading on the subject, what she needs most is an injection of imagination...acceptance of the possibility that she is mistaken.
Personally however, her views on abductions have nothing whatever to do with my views on UFOs.
Kyle
"Ultimately, then, the existence of ETs is a matter of opinion"
So she writes a book and goes on television based on her opinion, instead of science. Okaaaay...
The self-pity gets ratcheted up a notch with every new article I read about Clancy. The violin section is getting a bit jarring.
BTW, I second Paul's recommendation of "The Abduction Enigma."
For one, I happen to respect Clancy. Tom is not at all like Grishm.
For second, I reviewed the film ET and know for a fact that they exist.
Lorie Anderson
M D.
Arkansas USA
Little Rock
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