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From: Greg Sandow <gsandow@prodigy.net>
Date: Mon, 8 Feb 1999 20:11:21 -0500
Fwd Date: Tue, 09 Feb 1999 09:53:56 -0500
Subject: Re: Abduction - The Issue Of Reality


Work like you don't need the money.
Love like you've never been hurt.
Dance like nobody's watching.

http://www.gregsandow.com


>Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 14:58:03 -0600 (CST)
>To: UFO UpDates - Toronto <updates@globalserve.net>
>From: Dennis Stacy <dstacy@texas.net>
>Subject: Re: Abduction - The Issue Of Reality

>Greg,

>I find it somewhat ironic that elsewhere on this list, if not in
>this particular thread, you've also referred to Hopkins's
>mailbag, which you've also been allowed to dip into and read at
>random.

>Let's call it the Case of the Two Mail Bags. Clearly, you
>believe that one mailbag (abductions) is worth pursuing in much
>greater depth than the other mail bag (Elvis sightings). You
>also seem to think that the Hopkins mailbag is relatively free
>of media (and perhaps cultural) influence, whereas the contents
>of the Elvis bag are attributable (seemingly) to nothing but
>media influence.

Well, actually three mailbags. At the Weekly World News, I was
also able to root around in the mailbag full of letters from
people who'd seen Batboy, a creature the News made up -- half
bat, half human, and very dangerous -- which had escaped from a
federal facility. These letters divided into two obvious
categories. Some were clearly from the News's college-age
readers, who know the paper makes up its stories, and love to
play along. These letters were usually typed, took the whole
thing to a higher level of nonsense -- by claiming, for
instance, that Batboy only ate pomegranates -- and included
delicious faked photos.

The other letters were from the News's, um, general readership,
who believe every word. Most of these letters were written in
pencil, and recounted fleeting alleged sightings (out in the
woods while hunting, for example).

But I digress. I'm very lucky to have had a chance to read both
the Elvis and the abduction letters, and I wish more people with
strong opinions on abduction research could do the same. The two
mailbags were very different. People writing about Elvis, for
one thing, were certain they had seen him. Beyond that, their
letters had little in common. What Elvis was doing, how he
looked, what he said (if he said anything), what he said he'd
been doing all these years -- all those things varied from
letter to letter.

The abduction writers, on the other hand, overwhelmingly do
_not_ say they thought they'd been abducted. They're quite
explicit about this. They say, in letter after letter, that they
have no idea whether they've been abducted, but that they hope
Budd can tell them whether abduction might explain things they
say have been happening to them all their lives. They also don't
describe alien beings of any kind (beyond shadowy presences near
their beds). The experiences they do mention are consistent from
letter to letter -- lights in their room that they couldn't
explain, presences by the bed, UFO sightings, cases of missing
time serious enough to cause a family uproar, prolonged
searches, and calls to police. Many of the letters sound
distressed, while, by contrast, the Elvis letters were mostly
very calm.

These are facts. How the facts should be interpreted is another
story. In my view (factual part of message ends, interpretive
part begins), it's notable that the people writing to Budd don't
describe the most vivid parts of the standard abduction
narrative. Nobody's taking them anywhere, they aren't floating
in the are, they don't see big-eyed aliens, they aren't subject
to medical procedures, they don't have disappearing pregnancies.

It's true, of course, that they're all writing because they've
read Budd's books, or seen him speak at a conference, or seen
him on TV. So clearly he's inspired them to communicate, and
it's not unreasonable to wonder whether he somehow planted the
abduction story in their minds as well. But anyone who thinks he
did that -- or that they're catching the abduction story from
the media at large -- needs to explain why they don't
regurgitate that story in their letters, why they almost
uniformly relate only these muted, relatively non-compelling,
peripheral parts of it.

>So let's assume you get your wish and the entire social science
>department of a major university descends on these two sacks of
>mail. What would happen? I suspect both subjects would be
>approached from the same discipline, ie., some (perhaps
>particuliarized) form of phenomenology. Both reports (sightings
>of alien abductors and Elvis) would no doubt be treated as
>sociological facts, by definition. But I doubt that any
>sociologist worth his salt would even begin to approach the
>assumption that what was being seen, experienced and reported in
>one mailbag was indeed the original, real Elvis. Some could have
>been impersonators on their way to work, for example. For that
>matter, I have a cousin who is a pretty good ringer for Elvis,
>or at least the Thin Elvis.

>Similarly, they wouldn't regard it as their brief or province to
>establish the reality of UFO visitations, simply because it
>wouldn't ultimately make any difference to them, just as it
>wouldn't make any ultimate difference, sociologically speaking,
>if, by some miracle, Elvis were still alive. For one reason,
>they would quickly come to the conclusion that if A saw Elvis in
>San Francicso at a certain time and date, B couldn't have seen
>the real Elvis in New Jersey at the same time, unless the
>sociologists want to dip into the phenomenon referred to as
>bilocation, typically (but not always) associated with Saints
>and other religious figures. In other words, all the letters are
>real (as sociological facts), even if none of them are real
>physical facts. (That is, they couldn't all have seen Elvis.)

Dennis, I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here. As far
as I know, when social scientists study any phenomenon, they
absolutely need to know whether it has any obvious cause. Take,
for instance, the psychologists (well, not quite a social
science, but close enough) who've looked at abductions. Their
very first move is to explain why they don't think the
abductions are really happening, or else to make it clear,
without explanation, that they take that view. Why? Because
there's no point in finding a psychological explanation if
abductions are real.

Sociologists tend to look at real social phenomena. Suicide, for
instance -- Durkheim's study of that in the 19th century was the
beginning of modern sociology. The first thing they normally do
is gather data. Who commits suicide? What ethnic, religious,
social, economic groups do they belong to? At what point in
their lives do they kill themselves?

An approach to abduction letters or Elvis letters would be
similar. A psychologist might look at content, but a sociologist
would first look at who sent them, and only then try to
correlate content with the various categories of people who were
writing. Social scientists might also be interested in how the
stories spread. What gave people the idea that Elvis was out
there to be seen, or that they'd be believed if they wrote a
letter saying they'd seen him?

Eventually, any social scientist is likely to theorize -- to
come up with an overall explanation for what's happening. But if
you're trying to explain Elvis letters, you have to know whether
it's reasonable to say that Elvis is really alive. People seeing
someone generally known to be dead represent a rather different
social phenomenon from people who claim to see an elusive
celebrity, or bigfoot, or a serial killer on the ten most wanted
list. Sociologists examining abduction letters would clearly
have to make up their minds whether abductions might be real,
just as psychologists who study abductions do. Yes, it's
possible to examine the letters for what they tell us of the
social ramifications of abduction belief -- that's possible and
interesting whether abductions are real or not. But one's
opinion of the letter-writers is obviously going to be affected
by whether you think abductions are real, and good social
scientists know that.

Cultural theorists might be the one kind of social scientist
who'll theorize without bothering to gather quantifiable data.
But even they are likely to express some opinion on the reality
of something like abductions. There's an abduction book by Jodi
Dean, a political scientist who uses a cultural theory approach.
She's very sympathetic to abductees, and was attacked by
Frederick Crews in the New York Review of Books because she
refused to say that abductions were _not_ real. As she told me,
and recounts in a paper, she first became interested in
abductions by reading Phil Klass's attack on them. She found him
so excessive that his excesses became a phenomenon worth
studying, in her view. What cultural interests does a believe in
abduction reality threaten? That was the question that led to
her book. And while it's theoretically possible to write about
this without asking whether abductions are real, it's not
humanly likely.

Greg Sandow