Posted on 03/05/2005 6:09:03 PM PST by quidnunc
Since June 24, 1947, when a businessman called Kenneth Arnold saw a squadron of alien spaceships in the Cascade Mountains in Washington state — generally regarded as the first authentic UFO sighting of the post-war era — aliens have poured from the abyss that lies between ourselves and the world.
We know them well. They are the grey aliens with slanting, black eyes and vestigial nostrils whose corpses are kept at Area 51, a secret military base in the Nevada desert. They are the tall “Nordics” who gently oversee complex surgical procedures on human abductees. They are ET, the Borg, the Klingons and the Vulcans, the Pleiadians and the Nine.
“You’ve really taken on a monster here. Careers are really derailed by an interest in this subject,” Professor John Mack of Harvard University said when I told him I was writing a book about these real, dreamed, hallucinated or imagined creatures and the humans who have met or found themselves involved with them.
Mack spoke from experience. His own interest in alien abductions led to an inquisition by the Harvard authorities. He survived, though with many scars.
Mention aliens and you will at once be thought either mad or stupid, deluded or naive. Extraterrestrial visitation is the faith of rural hicks in the American Deep South or of lonely English teenage nerds who can’t get girlfriends.
People who think there may well be intelligent life elsewhere in the universe are not mad. People who have made contact with aliens, been abducted or who have seen flying saucers probably are. But I’m not mad and I have seen an alien spaceship in broad daylight in Norfolk. It was on the ground and I saw it as a glowing oval behind some trees. It was about 300 yards away.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
Hmmmm. For some reason, I have in my head that you are in the southern midwest. But I doubt that's right.
Where are you getting so much snow?
Prayers for warmth and health!
BTW, I think that UFO article was a good summary. Haven't read more than half of it but it seems well done and far from outlandish.
Blessings, headed to bed shortly.
Thanks for the prayers,and prayers for you and yours! Pleasant dreams............
Oh,did you see the show tonight about Area 51 on the Discovery of history (don't know which it was,as my husband put it on) channel? It was VERY interesting and I hadn't seen it before.
BTTT
In 1991 Robert Bigelow, a Las Vegas businessman, suggested to Hopkins and David Jacobs, another abduction investigator, that a poll should be conducted to find out how many abductees there were in America. The problem was that, if the aliens had made people forget abduction experiences, like the Hills, then whether a person was an abductee could not necessarily be established by a direct question. So the pollsters sought to discover peripheral incidents or experiences that suggested an abduction had taken place.
Almost 6,000 people were questioned and the results were startling: 18% had woken paralysed and seen a strange figure in the room, 15% had seen a frightening figure, 14% had had an out-of-body experience, 13% had missing time, 11% had seen a ghost, 10% had flown through the air, 8% had inexplicable scars, 7% had seen a UFO and 5% had dreamt of UFOs. A further sifting of the figures indicated that 2% of Americans, some 5m people, “have experienced events consistent with those that abductees experienced before they knew they were abductees”.
The figure was bizarre, wild, improbable and the image it evoked surreal in the extreme. If 5m people had been abducted, many repeatedly, there must be hundreds of thousands of people who periodically vanish and return without comment. And yet this whole, vast industrial project seemed to have left no trace of physical evidence.
On the other hand, a large number of otherwise mentally undisturbed people were having extremely strange experiences that seemed to have much in common. The information about these experiences was quite amazingly consistent. It was scarcely adequate to dismiss this vast human airlift as a mass hallucination.
Many, perhaps most, alien abduction accounts are retrieved under hypnosis. Hypnotic regression — taking people back to past events — can, it seems, break down the barrier of imposed amnesia. It has been suggested that memories are present in every part of the brain. All the aliens can do is block them. Hypnotism can unblock them.
There could be an explanation in which no amnesia effect occurs, however. In this case, what we see under hypnosis is a glimpse into a “third realm”, neither of the world nor of the human mind. The aliens are inhabitants neither of our minds nor of matter, but of something else that we are unable to grasp or apprehend except under hypnosis.
Or the accounts narrated under hypnosis must be artefacts of the hypnosis itself. If this is true, then the effects of hypnosis are quite staggeringly powerful. Thousands of people have been so convinced by what they have “remembered” under hypnosis that it has persuaded them that their previous recollections in normal states of consciousness have been utterly false.
Hypnosis is not something that can be understood in abstraction. So I asked David Oakley to hypnotise me at his office in Bloomsbury. Oakley has hypnotised people who have never claimed to be abducted by aliens. Yet, under hypnosis, they have produced compelling and detailed abduction accounts. I had never previously been hypnotised and had always assumed I would be a poor subject, possibly because I would be too analytical. In the event, neither analysis nor perversity proved a defence against Oakley’s powers.
I provided him with a description of a special place, the riverside garden of my house in Norfolk, in which I felt comfortable. He then put me under remarkably rapidly and, as far as I could tell, remarkably deeply. Hypnosis has the power to put you in two minds which, normally, do not so easily coexist. Or perhaps it simply intensifies the imagined at the expense of the real. I knew I was imagining Norfolk, but I was doing so with heightened capacities of evocation and memory. The real, Blooms-bury, had simply become a blurred background.
Oakley said: “Now take the calm feeling to your special place, sitting on that bench in the sunshine.” I returned to Norfolk. Then he simply asked if I noticed anything odd about it. At once I did. About 200 yards beyond the river rises a small hill topped with a dense thicket of trees. In the midst of these trees I now saw a glow. At first I tried to interpret this as a memory of a fire I had once seen up there. But that was at night and some way to the left. In any case, this glow was not fire-shaped, it was distinctly oval — flying saucer shaped, in fact.
I had made up my mind that it was, indeed, a UFO, but, just as I did so, Oakley quickly brought me out of the trance. He felt he didn’t know me well enough to take me further and he didn’t wish to add an overtone of anxiety to a place where I felt relaxed.
This didn’t matter. What did matter was the certainty with which I saw that glowing UFO. It was, quite simply, there. Obviously, I knew of Oakley’s past creation of abduction narratives under hypnosis and, equally obviously, UFOs were on my mind. I was predisposed to see this. But there is a big difference between thinking such things and seeing them.
There is, however, a nuance here. I knew I was in Bloomsbury and was merely evoking Norfolk in my mind. But is evoking the right word? Perhaps I was remembering an occasion on which I had seen a UFO in Norfolk but my conscious mind had suppressed the memory or it had been suppressed for me. Or I was imagining Norfolk with a UFO attached. I could do such a thing in a conscious state, but it would involve an effort that constantly reminded me it was not real. Under hypnosis, there was no doubt in my mind that I was really seeing this.
< snip >
Of course, the simplest explanation is probably true. I had never actually seen a UFO, I had simply imagined one under three distinct influences: my knowledge of Oakley’s experiments, my own preoccupations and the effects of a deep hypnotic trance. But the point is: I didn’t feel as though I was imagining anything. Listening to myself on the tape I made of the session, I can hear my voice sounds tentative, investigatory, not as though I am idly inventing.
This means that if Oakley had been determined to convince me that what I was seeing was a recollection and not an invention, then he could have done so, assuming I did not resist too fiercely. He would merely have confirmed what I felt to be true, that this was a flying saucer.
Evidently, therefore, if a large number of people who are convinced alien abductions are real are hypnotising even larger numbers of others who suspect they might be, then it is likely there will be many alien abduction narratives flying around, as, indeed, there are. Of course, this is not proof they are not true, but it does provide a persuasive context for a simple psychosocial explanation. Hypnotism is a technique that triggers a mass storytelling project in which all the stories are linked.
On the basis of my experience, I cannot argue with this. But I do believe it does not say enough. All it tells us is that we are prone to see such things in a hypnotic state. It does not tell us why, and it does not answer the deeper questions about the nature of human experience that are implied by the phenomenon of such visions.
These questions become even more profound when we remember that many people see these things in full consciousness and without any suppression of the memories they inspire. These are questions about the way we apprehend the world, not about the truth or otherwise of alien experiences.
< end >
What you saw was a legitimate UFO. Back in about 1984 they stopped using the flashing lights because they found that it brought too much attention to their crafts.
Thats pretty much why reports of sightings have dropped off in recent years, they're flying at night in blackout mode. On the rare occurance where one is sighted it is usually due to one of the crew members shining a flashlight out one of the windows, which by the way is strictly forbidden.. However when that occurs, it is usually shrugged off as an orbiting satellite and the crew member, if caught gets into a whole lot of trouble........
THEN there's a local tradition on FR becasue of a thread I cannot now find in which some hapless, fumble-fingered, orthographically-challenged guy typed
Hugh (-huge),
Series (=serious),
and beeber(=beeper).
These struck the sicker of us(among whom I am proud to number myself) as totally hysterical and to us, repetition makes them funnier.
I'm entirely series about this. All your typo are belong to us.
Well, Quix, you know about me. As one wag hereabout said something like: 'I don't believe in intelligent life here on earth let alone outer space.'
A neighbor lady a few summers ago went to Sedona, AZ on a new-age spiritual discovery trip. Uh-huh. One of her spiritual objectives was to see a flying saucer. When she came back, we chatted a bit and I asked if she had seen her saucer. She got excited and said yes, took a breath and remembered who she was talking to and toned it down to a more conservative 'Yes, I saw something. Mayber I'll tell you about it someday.'
The author, you'll note, recovered his experience after hypnosis - strike one. He saw a glowing disk and specifically identified it as a flying craft - strike two. He made his identification from nearly 1,000 feet away with a screen of trees between him and the object - strike three.
Beyond that, it's more he said, she said, they said. I guess I'll need to be abducted before I believe in this stuff - and then, only if they let me fly the sucker...
See post #25 - it explains all.
I hate to say how many categories I fall into here, but I will say that awaking paralyzed is fairly common, and seems to have a genetic component (my blood relatives all do it). When you are awake, in the dark, paralyzed, you see and experience all kinds of stuff (VERY frightening)--which pretty much covers everything on the list following night paralysis. It's like you're awake but the dreaming part of the mind has not shut off.
In short, nothing here has a paranormal explanation.
Thanks.
I've seen it 2-3 times. I don't know yet what to quite make of Bob L. but I believe he's shared at least SOME truth about such things.
I mostly take him at face value. But he could certainly be part of a disinformation campaign . . . mixing truth with falsehood. Mostly, as a shrink--he doesn't come across that way. He comes across as pretty authentic, to me.
Ceretainly.
It's fascinating how all the naysayers feel so compulsively compelled to toss in their rocks and silly pics right away on such threads. Fascinating psychological/sociological phenomena, that.
Now precious Dave,
you KNOW legions of naysayers are not really that interested in the truth and will just glibly slide over that very key fact!
LOL.
Thanks.
Interesting.
Can you share any more interesting tidbits from wherever???
Either hereon or via FREEPMAIL?
Or was this a total joke?
At least you are consistent! LOL.
Actually, no.
It only muddies the water!
And sometimes geniuses are the dummest of people as well as of observers.
But not always.
Just as sometimes, hayseed are excellent observers.
You can assert that nothing here has a paranormal explanation.
Doesn't make it so.
As a shrink who's had a full range of interesting night experiences including what could reasonably be called the sleep paralysis thing . . . except that I'm pretty certain I've never been abducted by ET's . . .
I assert that the sleep paralysis thing doesn't begin to explain near everything in this topic area.
Seriesly?
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