Alien abductees prone to false memories

says Professor Chris French, who surveyed 19 self-proclaimed alien abductees.

A whole nineteen cases? And plagiarized the conclusion? Wow, I'm impressed. ;')

ah, here it is...

'We can implant entirely false memories'
The Guardian | Thursday December 4, 2003 | NOT ATTRIBUTED
Posted on 12/08/2003 3:39:13 PM PST by GluteusMax
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1036517/posts

Here's my theory of alien abductions. I posted it before to someone who wrote the sentence in caps:

"CHRISTIAN EXPERTS SAY UFO 'ABDUCTIONS' ARE HORROR OF FALLEN ANGELS"

Ha ha ha ha ha. I've got a better explanation that either alien abductionsor fallen angels. Note that many of these abduction tales have these common features:

1. The person awakens at night in his bedroom.
2. He is paralyzed.
3. He is borne along paralyzed somewhere in the night.
4. When he arrives it is to a brightly lighted room filled with strange objects and weird-looking genderless bald creatures that appear to be mostly big eyes.
5. They do medical things to him, painful things, that he is powerless to resist, often involving sharp pains to the abdomen and/or to the genitals.
6. He is eventually returned to his bed.

Another interesting tidbit is that, at least at the time I read it several year ago, among supposed abductees there were none that were born by Caesarian. All were vaginal deliveries.

My explanation for alien abduction stories is that they are a combination of two things:

1. the mind awakening while the body is still in the paralyzed state characteristic of certain parts of the sleep cycle, and

2. a heavily-processed memory of one's earliest traumatic experience—being born. The experience was, for some, so striking that memories were formed, but merely as sensory impressions with virtually no intellectual context since the infant had not yet developed a sophisticated means of explaining his world to himself, and accompanied by feelings of pain (which is hardwired) and fear (which depends only on a sudden unexpected change of environment especially when accompanied by pain) which are known to be effective agents for imprinting sensory memory. The processing comes in later when the sensory memory for some reason is triggered, perhaps by a episode of sleep paralysis, and dressed up in imagery consistent with conventional mythic import--now it is space aliens, in previous ages it was incubi and succubi settling down upon the paralyzed yet aware sleeper for some bodily trauma or sex. And perhaps it is this trauma bridging the two locations of pre and post birth that serves to result in a lasting neural imprint of the sensory input. It would be interesting to see if there is a greater number of 'abductees' who were born to mothers undergoing 'natural' childbirth without drugs for pain and in hospital than to those who were heavily sedated (which can affect the unborn infant as well).

4. When he arrives it is to a brightly lighted room filled with strange objects and weird—looking genderless bald creatures that appear to be mostly big eyes.

He comes into a brightly lighted and noisy delivery room. He sees brightly lighted objects. He sees people moving around. Both the doctors and nurses are clothed pretty much the same, gender-revealing features being obscured by masks, gowns, and caps. Just about the only facial features easily seen, and therefore made all the more prominent, are the eyes. The significance of eyes also seems to be hardwired, depending little on any advanced levels of cognition (viz, the supposed effectiveness of what appear to be eyes in protective coloration)

5. They do medical things to him, painful things, that he is powerless to resist.

Medical procedures are done to him: his umbilical cord is severed. He may have blood drawn. He is given a series of reflex tests. If he’s a boy, he is often circumcised. He can do nothing to stop it.

6. He is eventually returned to his bed.

After all the light, noise, and pain, he is bundled up and placed in a relatively quiet nursery and in an unmoving, still bed—quite unlike the warm and gurgling place the womb was. Into a bed, in fact, quite like the one he is experiencing in his conscious state of sleep paralysis. He falls back asleep and eventually wakens. If he remembers anything at all,it is recast in terms of his current beliefs and imagery.

Given this scenario, we would expect to find abduction stories most often among those who were born in hospitals under conditions of light or no sedation (or at least given to the mother late enough in the delivery to miminally impact the infant) and who also, perhaps, are narcoleptic and during a time in history and in countries in which there is a cultural mythology about aliens and abductions.

And it's interesting to note that a lot of these abduction stories are not spontaneous recollections but are elicited through hypnosis, a state in which a person can become hyper-aware of memories** as well as very open to suggestion. If the operator or the subject (but especially if both) has already assumed that such abductions are real, then it is all the more likely that any such remnant memory of birth would be reinterpreted according to the imagery of abduction stories known to either or both.

* Several other symptoms commonly occur with narcolepsy:

Sleep attacks(short, irresistible episodes of sleep during the day).

Sleep paralysis (the inability to move while going to sleep or waking up).

Hypnagogic hallucinations (intense visual or auditory experiences at the beginning or end of a sleep period that are hard to distinguish from reality and are sometimes terrifying).

Disturbed night time sleep (tossing and turning in bed, leg jerking, nightmares, and frequent awakenings).

**The recall of memory under hypnosis appears to be more like that caused during brain surgery in which memories are triggered in an almost holographic recall instead of as an intellectual Cliff's note summary of the memory, more typical of waking recollection.

Horsesh*t! Pure theory on your part in referring this to hard facts from abductees!

I personally have a friend who had a radiosond device (control chip) removed from his ankle after a nine hour abduction. The device was put under a microscope and it's characteristics revealed were that of a hard metallic-like obelisk-shaped piece (size of a piece of white rice only charcoal in color), that had thousands if diamond-shaped sides to it.

Question: Did my friend 'dream' this? Huh?

Horsesh*t! Pure theory on your part in referring this to hard facts from abductees!

I personally have a friend who had a radiosond [sic] device (control chip) removed from his ankle after a nine hour abduction. The device was put under a microscope and it's [sic] characteristics revealed were that of a hard metallic-like obelisk-shaped piece (size of a piece of white rice only charcoal in color), that had thousands if diamond-shaped sides to it.

Ha ha ha. Hard facts. That's a good one. How does one have a friend except personally? Did your friend tell you this or were you there for the removal and analysis? How was it determined to have been a device, much less "radiosond." If a radiosonde device, it would not, then, have been a "control" chip. If a "control chip," it doesn't seem to have been controlling much since it was detected and removed.

I won't give a lengthy reply, since you seem to have all the answers about alien abduction, theoretically, at least.

Yeah, you're cutting edge, alright. Ride that rocket ship, babe!

LOL!