From: Jerome Clark <jkclark@frontiernet.net> Date: Sun, 20 Dec 98 12:56:24 PST Fwd Date: Sun, 20 Dec 1998 14:39:00 -0500 Subject: Re: Abductions and Researcher Bias >From: Tim Brigham - Devil's Advocate <devilsad@ksinc.net> >To: <updates@globalserve.net> >Subject: Abductions and Researcher Bias >Date: Sat, 19 Dec 1998 22:00:27 -0600 >After following a few of the various discussions re abductions >recently on this list (especially ones focusing heavily on >social factors), thought the following might be of interest. >Source: The Devil's Advocate >www.devilsadvocate.base.org >(originally appeared in the print zine). >"Abductions and Researcher Bias" or >"Why Does every Abduction Researcher always find his own >Favorite Breed of Alien?" >by >Martin Kottmeyer It is perhaps wise to remember that Kottmeyer has also argued -- in an article in The Anomalist -- that the 1952 wave was occasioned by mass anxiety about a steel strike. As I have written elsewhere, as a UFO debunker Martin Kottmeyer knows a lot about popular culture. Every time I hear that "every abduction researcher always finds his own favorite breed of alien" -- something I know not to be true from my own abduction researches in the 1970s, but never mind -- I think of an episode I witnessed around (if memory serves) 1974 -- long, of course, before Hopkins, Jacobs, Mack, and the abduction flood that began in the early 1980s. A couple whom I knew slightly had an extraordinarily strange UFO experience, lasting over several hours, while traveling through Utah. In the course of my interviews with them, I found odd gaps in the narrative, and I began to wonder if hypnotic probing might not be usefully employed. But I didn't know anybody who could do the hypnotizing. I asked a psychology professor at a local college if he had any candidates, and he told me he knew a psychiatrist who used hypnosis in his practice. He would approach X and ask him if he would hypnotize the couple as a courtesy to a colleague. When informed what the hypnosis was about (a couple who had undergone a UFO experience), X was flabbergasted. He made no secret of his strong conviction that this was as nonsensical as anything one could imagine. Still, the professor prevailed upon him to do it as a personal favor. The psychologist and I thought it would be a good idea if, after the sessions, the couple were given the suggestion that they would not remember what they had said under hypnosis. Our reasoning was that this would keep them from contaminating each other's testimony until we learned what, if anything, might be there. X (with whom I had no direct dealings) insisted that nobody be there during the hypnosis except himself and, of course, the couple. After the sessions tapes were given to the psychology professor, who told me that X had been visibly upset. X said he had fallen into something he wanted no further part of, because he did not understand it, he did not know about it, and he feared the consequences for the couple. Shocked, the professor and I listened to the tapes together. They related the sort of abduction experience, complete with little gray humanoids of the kind we would all hear about in the following decade, with which we are all now familiar. Their stories, related separately, complemented each other. I went to talk with the couple. They, too, were upset. All they knew was that after the hypnosis sessions, of whose content they had no recall, X had fled out the door as soon as possible. He'd told them only, "I don't want to ruin your lives." Nobody, in short, looking for favorite aliens or even knowing what "favorite aliens" are. The only thing being looked for was validation of X's conviction that UFOs were nonsense -- an expectation disappointed. Jerry Clark
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