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Date: Sat, 08 Nov 1997 22:35:52 -0500

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From: UFO UpDates - Toronto <updates@globalserve.net> Subject: UFO UpDate: Clark on Abductions 1/2 Mime-Version: 1.0

 

Date: Sat, 8 Nov 1997 19:20:22 -0500

From: Peregrine Mendoza <101653.2205@compuserve.com> [Peter Brookesmith] Subject: Clark on Abductions 1/2

To: UFO UpDates - Toronto <updates@globalserve.net>

 
The Duke of Mendoza presents his compliments to the List.

>From: clark@canby.mn.frontiercomm.net [Jerome Clark] Date: Fri, 17 Oct 1997 20:03:10 PDT

>To: updates@globalserve.net

>Subject: RE: UFO UpDate: Re: Questions for Abductees

 Even 48 hours is a long time in Cyberville, so for those like me who are unlikely to recall what Jerome said on this subject some three weeks ago, I'm going to be dealing with the points he raised here about (a) the Sandy Larson and the Hills cases (b) the empirical nature of Dr Thomas "Ed" Bullard's research and, in passing, (c) folklore and folklorists and ufology and the abduction syndrome. So if you'd rather watch the game, you can switch channels now.

 For economy I've quoted only what seem to me the core parts of Jerome's argument, without indicating snips, safe in the knowledge that if anyone thinks I've misrepresented or quoted him out of context, I shall be brought swiftly to book.

 SANDY LARSON, THE HILLS, &c

Jerome writes:

>When you have a credible multi-witness abduction story, it's pretty hard to argue that you're dealing with a subjective phenomenon.

 The credibility of any report of any event, mundane or anomalous, is speciously enhanced by convergent testimony of multiple witnesses, but there is more to the Larson case than that. And a lot hinges on that word "credible": it suggests how subjective the initial decision to investigate may be. Jerome comments that he was & is impressed because the Larson case (and the other that he cites, for some reason anonymously) featured conscious memories of UFO sightings and missing time. This is little enough to kickstart a investigation, but at least is 100% wider-ranging than what has started others' whiskers twitching. To me it suggests that consciously or otherwise the benchmark for initially justifying investigation and later for believing the case genuine is the abduction of Betty & Barney Hill.

 This is interesting in part because that is the case Budd Hopkins took as his template for judging the apparent reality of an abduction claim. The peculiar defensiveness of ufologists toward the Hills' case is based more on its mythic status than on objective evidence. (Ironically, Betty Hill is extremely rude in private about the competence and claims of Hopkins, et al, and fairly scathing in her book, "A Common Sense Approach to UFOs", ISBN 9648243-0-2, which I commend to all and sundry.) The Hill case can be deconstructed in exactly the way Dr Benjamin Simon did - seeing it as related directly to Betty's dreams. In other words, it does not need to be "real" to be explicable. Sometimes people get things right first time.

 Relevant aside: The claim made in the Boy Bishop of Canby's Bible that Dr Simon was "antipathetic" to UFOs ("High Strangeness" p248) is not borne out by John Fuller's "The Interrupted Journey", where Simon's neutrality on the whole issue (he had had two UFO sightings himself) is touched on at least four times (pp 85, 89, 134, 313-4 of the Transworld p/back, 1981 edn). Jerome scries Simon implicitly [note that word!] and a priori rejecting UFOs and so a literal interpretation of the Hills' experience, which in my view is just more Clarkian clairvoyance. According to Fuller (p314), "contradictory evidence prevented the doctor from" accepting the experience as reality; "his best alternative lay in the dream hypothesis"; and of that, Simon is quoted saying: "But I'm not absolutely convinced. ... Therapeutically, we had reached a good place to stop.... It was acceptable in my judgement to leave it not fully answered." [Unchecked hearsay: Simon apparently became brusque at Walter Webb's attempts to show him "UFO evidence", but before regarding that as a significant datum we'd need to know if Simon felt harassed by Webb. Unfortunately the whereabouts of Simon's (unpublished) memoirs, which might illuminate the point, is currently unknown.]

 The Larson case first came to Jerome's attention in autumn 1975, as a result of Sandy Larson seeing the NBC-TV movie "The UFO Incident" (based on the Hills' experience) and wondering if what she recalled of her experience of 26 August 1975 had a similar explanation.

 At that time there were precious few alleged abductions generally known among ufologists: Antonio Villas Boas (1957), the Hills (*1961), Herb Schirmer (*1967 - more an invitation than an abduction, and with strong contactee overtones), JosÈ AntÙnio da Silva (1969), Hodges & Rodriguez (1971, another case with shades of contacteeism), Hickson & Parker (*1973; later claims by Hickson put him in the contactee bracket), Pat Roach ("Patty Price") (1973), Carl Higdon (1974), the "Avis" family (1974), Charles Moody (1975 - which was breaking almost simultaneously with the Larson case), David Stephens (1975; not investigated until December that year) and Travis Walton (*1975 - which made international news a few weeks before Larson was investigated in person) constitute a fairly complete list, and I am not sure that news of the Avis case had reached the USA by autumn 1975. Most featured missing time, all began with a UFO sighting, and seven of these 12 are multiple-witness events. At least four (starred) were widely publicized outside the UFO literature. Leaving aside other divergences, the disparity between the entities reported is extraordinary:

 Villas Boas Striking blonde, short, fair-skinned humanoid female with slanted blue eyes & triangular face; features of male aliens not seen (uniformed, helmeted; wore breathing apparatus); barking speech

 Hills Uniformed, short, gray-skinned with wraparound eyes but "normal" iris & pupils. Initially described as big-nosed; description later changed to nearer Gray configuration, but entities had human-like hair

 Schirmer Humanoid with high forehead, long nose, sunken cat-like eyes, slit mouth; carrying 'radio' on 'helmet'; uniformed da Silva Hairy red-bearded dwarves; uniformed and helmeted initially; one Nordic (possibly vision of Christ)

 Hodges/ Brain-like entities and tall gray-skinned

Rodriguez humanoids with yellow eyes, lipless mouths & flat noses. Webbed hands with six fingers and a thumb

 Hickson/Parker Tall gray creature with bizarre cephalic & other features, hands like lobster claws, elephant-like skin; robotic?

 Roach Short, large eyes, slit mouths, no nose, pasty skin, three-digit hands; uniformed, with gloves & Sam Browne belts. Case since deconstructed as the product of priming the central witness by lead investigator

 Higdon Tall humanoid, in black suit & black shoes; bow-legged; 'slanted head and no chin', thin hair 'stood straight up on his head'

 Avises Humanoid 'controllers': one-piece silvery suits; slanted pink eyes with no pupils; long noses. Examiners: hairy, bearded dwarves with triangular eyes, beaked noses and slit-like mouths and hairy, claw-like hands

 Moody Near-classic grays, 5-digit hands, uniformed

 Stephens 'Mushroom'-like creatures: hands with 3 digits & thumb, extremely pale skin, no mouths, 3.5ft tall; wore 'robelike garments'

 Larson 6ft-tall, mummy-like entities; glaring eyes that 'could control my brain'; metallic arms

 Walton Small Gray-like creatures in orange jumpsuits; tall humanoids (one female) in blue jumpsuits; unusual gold/brown eyes

 The dropping and gathering of different motifs within a broad general framework - one established, by and large, by the Hill case - is exactly like the operation of folklore. In 1975 there was little established imagery in the canon and the abduction syndrome was at once limited by this and open to development in any imaginative direction. One can speculate at length about why abduction imagery eventually settled (not exclusively) in the direction of the Grays, but that's beyond my scope here. At any rate the Grays' roots are visible in these early cases, but not in Larson's. Likewise Larson's anticipates later motifs in ways the others do not, but the proleptic motifs are common in other psychodramas enacted in altered states of consciousness (accepting that hypnosis is that). Their ufological-cum-alien garb can reasonably be ascribed to the set and setting of the hypnotic sessions themselves, fertilized by the Hill and Pascagoula cases. There is, it seems, a limit to the human imagination. An essential point is that in 1975 the reported physical appearances of the entities alone was heterogeneous; the folklore had not crystallized.

 The Hills' case has a dramatic simplicity and appropriateness that by itself accounts for most of Bullard's famous order of events - again nailed by Kottmeyer: the key essays are "Entirely Unpredisposed?", which is available from the Magonia website: http://www.magonia.demon.co.uk/authors and "The Eyes That Spoke", on the REALL website cited above.

 Larson's inspiration that her odd experience may have been an abduction came directly from the dramatization of the Hills' case. In short, she had set herself up to learn she was an abductee. No one knows - or says - to what extent she familiarized herself with the UFO literature before she was hypnotized. She was questioned under hypnosis in conditions that broke all the most basic rules of such interrogation. The most elaborate account emerged with the least experienced hypnotist.

 >What impresses me even more, in retrospect, is how much what these people reported anticipated what was to >come. The Sandy Larson case [...] is one of these. [...] Not long ago, moreover, I was surprised to come upon an >obscure CE3 in which an entity identical to the one reported by Larson figured.

 Apart from a UFO sighting and missing time, the Larson case is proleptic of floating through solid walls, tunnels of light, nasal examination (Larson had had a sinus operation in real life), and visiting an alien base in a desert landscape. What is more striking to the dispassionate eye is the extent to which the Larson case does *not* conform to the abduction template. Larson as far as I recall is the only abductee to have her brain removed and 'rewired', an operation that produced no scars, or none noted by the investigators (Leo Sprinkle, Allen Hynek, Jerome Clark). Martin Kottmeyer has traced the mummy imagery to the Pascagoula case, and beyond:

 One possibility is that it relates to her falling into the hands of APRO which had a special interest in the Pascagoula abduction of 1973. It was ... only people with APRO who called attention to the mummy-like appearance of the Pascagoula entity and deemed it a feature that enhanced the credibility of the case. ...

 Much of the case seems different from anything reported before. Only the Pascagoula case seems reprised, and then in only two particulars. They both involve tummy exams by mummies. It is no stretch to believe she picked up these motifs in conversation with UFO buffs or researchers prior to her hypnosis sessions. Other than this, the two cases are different. ...

 The question returns for Pascagoula ... why did Charles Hickson opt for space mummies? ...

 Fortunately, the Lorenzens saved historians a big headache by themselves covering similarities between the Pascagoula entity and a case out of Peru involving a man designated C.A.V. The man encountered three mummies with a generally human profile, but the legs were joined and they slid along the ground. They were about 5'9" in height. The face was mostly featureless save for a sort- of nose. The arms seemed normal, but the hand consisted of a group of four fingers stuck together and a separate thumb creating the impression of pincers or claws. The match to the Pascagoula entity is remarkably good, and I have to agree with the Lorenzens that the odds against happenstance are too remote to be considered. They add that neither Hickson nor Parker (the other Pascagoula experiment) had prior UFO interest, and the case appeared "only" in the APRO Bulletin and chapter 8 in their 1968 book UFOs Over the Americas.

 "Only" is not exactly how I would describe a Signet paperback which was mass-marketed across America on wire racks in drug stores and five and dimes, but perhaps they were being modest. The Lorenzens further wondered why, if both cases involve fabrication, this particular form was chosen. "Why not a more acceptable and more frequently reported type?" More believable occupant encounters were readily available. They temporarily prefigure Fowler and Hopkins in their style of argument by ignoring the equally striking disparities between the two cases in these remarks from Encounters with UFO Occupants. Happily, they rectify this shortcoming in their next book Abducted! when they grant, "The only real difference between the two descriptions was that the Peruvian said the skin of the creatures was sandy-colored and that they had 'bubbles' where the eyes would be which moved around." This is at least a start. C.A.V.'s UFO is shaped like a disc. Hickson's UFO is shaped like a fish. C.A.V.'s entities were lost and asked to see our chief. They carry on an extended conversation about a variety of things including how we are endangering the balance of the universe and how they are able to reproduce by fission. C.A.V. tries to abduct one of the mummies as they try to leave in an effort to get rich, but they were too slippery. They don't try to abduct him and conduct a tummy exam. If the entities are the same because they are real, why are their craft and behaviors so different?

 The fish shape of the craft and the tummy exam with the eye are critical clues to what is going on here. They are not part of the C.A.V. case, but they are part of UFOs Over the Americas. Chapter 3 is called 'Underwater UFOs' and features a June 1959 incident from Buenos Aires involving an object generally shaped like a huge fish. The eye over the tummy is a compositing of cases on page 206: an 1880 incident involving a luminous ball suspended in mid-air, leaving the percipient terror-stricken, which is followed by a brief account of the Hill case and their physical examination, after which the authors discuss how UFOs could induce hypnotic effects and shock.

 The blending and distortion of the elements of these cases is identical to the way dreams remix and composite recent memories to come up with a dramatic experience. The choice of the mummies by Hickson's mind stems from the title given the chapter relating the C.A.V. case: "The Flesh Crawlers." It was the scariest-looking alien in the book. It worked. Charlie Hickson's personal account is reprinted in UFO Contact at Pascagoula and includes this line: "My flesh crawls when I think about those three things that appeared through the opening."

 With respect to C.A.V., the Lorenzens' objections about acceptability and frequency collapses with the realization that C.A.V. hailed from Peru. Peruvian culture is significantly different from the one the Lorenzens were living in. Mummies were pervasive in Incan religion. Incan leaders were embalmed with great care and their remains were worshipped like a god. It would be placed in temples. Sacrifices would be made to it. It was brought out for festivals. People were assigned to take care of the mummy. One archaeologist found a Necropolis of 429 mummies which demonstrated the antiquity of the practice in Nazcan culture. It would take an expert in Peruvian folklore to track down the immediate cultural precursors to C.A.V.'s experience, but we don't need a detailed analysis to understand that a Peruvian might find the idea of space mummies far more believable and emotionally resonant than would people in the USA.

 --Martin Kottmeyer, "The Curse of the Space Mummies", Promises & Disappointments #1 (1995); also on the REALL website, from

http://www.reall.org/newsletter/

 >Duke can rant all he wants about what he sees as our failings. I don't claim to be perfect, and this was, after all, >1975-76. I do feel sanguine about this much: the story stands up, and we investigators did not shape it.

 Irrelevant asides (1): The proper forms are 'the Duke', 'His Grace' or 'Your Grace'. I have been a jazz musician in my time but my surname was never Ellington. Irrelevant asides (2): I'll ignore the posturing about ranting.

 What the date of Jerome's investigation has to do with anything I do not know. I do not suggest the Larson story was entirely the product of leading (see above), but that leading of gross proportions did take place is apparent from the Lorenzens' account alone. And the core narrative detail of the Larson case was obtained from hypnotic regression, and as such is automatically suspect, even without the incompetence displayed by the investigators. Take away the hypnotic material, as caution would dictate, and we are left not with a story that "stands up" but a UFO sighting that bears many marks of a meteor shower, some unsurprisingly UFO-related dreams, a strange rearrangement of persons in a car, and some "missing" time. Yes, there are oddities here, but they do not require an abduction to explain them.

 Finally, on this case, the multiplicity of witnesses has been shown time and again to be no guarantor of the objective truth of anything, let alone abductions. The double abductions at Longmont, Colorado (19 Nov 1980), and at Goodland, Kansas (7 Nov 1989), the Jack & Peter Wilson case, the Hill case, the Larson case, the Avis case, even the egregious Cortibalone case, can all be plausibly deconstructed. And remember Fatima? Does Jerome really think the Sun danced in the heavens that day? According to legend, 70,000 people saw it happen.

 CHIEF EDDIE HARD BULL'S EMPIRICAL APPROACH

 Jerome writes:

 >Duke wants to believe, and wants us to believe, that ufologists lead abductees. No one would say that never >happens, or that we shouldn't be concerned about it, but there is no empirical evidence -- for all critics like Duke >would have us believe to the contrary -- that this is the usual course of action, or that it's even, so far, a measurable >problem. Again, go to Bullard's The Sympathetic Ear (1995). Unlike his critics, Bullard frames falsifiable >hypotheses and investigates them empirically. The empirical evidence so far indicates that whatever an investigator's >predisposition, abduction accounts end up sounding pretty much the same. So (as Bullard showed in an earlier >JUFOS paper) do hypnotically elicited and consciously recalled accounts. As a rule, as investigators have long >insisted, abductees are not leadable.

 Jerome entirely ignores four things here. They are: the natural dramatic structure of the typical abduction account; the *collaboration* of candidate abductees and their ufological investigators ("set and setting" in trade jargon); the numerous detailed parallels to the structure and imagery of abduction accounts found in other kinds of anomalous experience; and, most blindly of all, the fundamental cock-up in the design of Chief Eddie Hard Bull's research. For what he did was ask ABDUCTION INVESTIGATORS whether they led or influenced their subjects.

 Researcher:

Would you say you were a prime cause of World War II? Adolf Hitler (for it is he): Outrageyous! I voss surrhounded by foollss!

 Or, to adapt an analogy I've used before: Bullard's method is like a time & motion expert who wants to find out how productive a coal mine is. But instead of dividing tonnes of coal delivered to the pit head by man-hours paid for, he goes about asking the miners if they work hard.

 Miner:

Ay, laik a fookin dog, lad, aye, lewk ut dirt on clogs, and all fair nowt, lewk ut starvin' babbies. Mrs Miner:
Eeeh, tha bloody liar. Tha's led mooer strikes than tha's ad hot dinners, tha reet lazy bastard.

 >Bullard is so uniquely valuable: a believer in empiricism in this field is to be treasured. No wonder he drives the >critics nuts. He doesn't play by their rules and, in his own gentle, understated way, shows that their rules get us >nowhere.

 Bullard doesn't play by the accepted rules, or any acceptable rules, of objective research, in "The Sympathetic Ear", full point, end of story. That's one reason why he drives this critic nuts. And this is the genius Jerome hauls out at every opportunity to illustrate the hard-nosed logic of ufologists, the airy vacancies of their critics, and the fanciful ululations of psychosociologists, crepuscular creatures of the sepulchre that they are.

 >I was JOKING, Duke, when I cracked wise about abductees burying themselves in obscure folklore texts. Okay? I >was poking fun at psychosocial theorists who act as if the mere existence of some obscure folklore parallel to a >modern abduction report deflates the latter. Let me quote Bullard here:

 >"In most other efforts to establish media or cultural influences, standards of evidence are most conspicuous by their >absence. After fishing expeditions amid folklore, science-fiction literature, and movie imagery, psychosocial >theorists satisfy themselves to draw isolated motifs out of context, select favorable examples but ignore the rest, and >never worry about whether the obscurity of sources limits the likelihood that an abductee might have seen them. >Movies are a plausible source because they enjoy mass exposure, but why abductees choose the same narrow >selection of movie elements when Hollywood has offered so much variety remains an unanswered question."

 Bullard seems to be saying in slightly more flowery language what Jerome claimed to be uttering as a joke. A slight contradiction here? (I am all for empiricism.) In any case, Bullard traduces the "psychosocial theorists" by erecting a strawman of cause-and- effect, or direct acquisition of imagery or motifs ("the obscurity of sources"), which no one, as far as I know, has ever proposed to occur in so grossly simplistic a fashion. That there are parallels with other cultural material is undeniable; and one of the best has been enunciated by Bertrand MÈheust, in his essay in Evans & Spencer's "UFOs 1947-1987" (Fortean Tomes 1987, ISBN 1-870021-02-9), which does anything but rip things untimely from their context. To discover why and how those parallels occur, and what meaning we can draw from the abduction experience, and why the unmediated *experience* is mirrored by abduction accounts given under hypnosis, is the central challenge of the phenomenon, and of one of the best endeavors of psychosocial ufology. Yes, abductions are a mystery, but trying to solve the problem by hitting it with the literaist presumption of the ETH is to approach it from the wrong end.

 Perhaps Jerome's notion of empirical research is illustrated by his proposal to re-examine old CE-III accounts and comb them for signs of abduction. This follows exactly the false logic of Westrum et al in interpretating their infamous Roper poll results to claim 3.7 million US citizens may be abductees.

 >And then there's Martin Kottmeyer with his spurious claim about the "Bollero Shield" Outer Limits episode and its >supposed effect on Barney Hill's testimony. The connection can be rejected on other grounds (see High Strangeness, >p. 250), but what is particularly striking is that Kottmeyer was content simply to draw the connection without >bothering to ask Betty Hill if she and Barney were in the habit of watching Outer Limits. (I did ask her; they >weren't.)

 Now, as Bismarck once remarked, for the pig-sticking.

 I asked her too, and reported my tentative conclusions in "On Martian Cats", posted here on about 9 Aug 97 & still available I imagine from the UpDates archive on the Web. [ http://www.ufomind.com/ufo/updates/1997/aug/m10-011.shtml ] Kottmeyer has since had this to say:

 I was intrigued to hear that Betty Hill denies that her husband Barney would have seen "The Bellero Shield" episode of THE OUTER LIMITS because they did not "watch that kind of TV program," she being "rather more intellectual than one might guess." It must be pointed out that the ad campaign for THE OUTER LIMITS pitched the show as one of "conspicuous excellence" and that one piece for TV Guide bore the come-on "They Deal in Ideas - and Outer Space." The particular episode of interest "The Bellero Shield" was richly Shakespearian in tone with parts adapted from "MacBeth." If allusions to Shakespeare are not one of [the] major symptoms of being an intellectual, it would be hard to know what is. It was a show by intellectuals and pitched partly as philosophy to the network brass. Betty Hill is not helping her case with such an upside-down reason as the basis of her denial.

 [You say] there is no proof that Barney Hill saw "The Bellero Shield" and none he did not. Take another look at the argument I made in "The Eyes That Spoke." The similarity between the alien in "The Bellero Shield" and the ufonaut described by Barney is not limited to the rare trait of wraparound eyes. They also share the unique bond of having eyes that speak. I also cite other features like a tilted bullet-like head which are less unique but also argue for a close relationship. It is hard to develop a rigorous statistical argument in situations like this, but my back-of-the-envelope calculations suggests odds against chance of the traits of wraparound eyes and speaking eyes appearing together in an SF production in the same month as Barney's hypnosis session are on the order of 100,000,000 to 1. Include the other features and the zeros string out even further.

 Suitably astonished, I've asked him how he arrived at that figure, and await the response. The intermediary who initially passed "Of Martian Cats" to Martin K. commented:

 As you can see from the attached, the Yeoman Farmer of Carlyle is a bit touchy about Jerome Clark's favorite attempt to refute the Barney Hill/Bellero Shield connection (though oddly enough Clark's favorite talisman to ward off criticism of abduction research, Bullard, found Martin's argument convincing). I tend to agree with Martin that the incredible coincidence that Barney Hill described an alien with talking eyes that looked so similar to the Bifrost alien just days after the episode aired is pretty good circumstantial evidence that Barney was exposed to the Bellero Shield alien's image. Betty's denial is pretty thin gruel, unless someone is going to seriously argue that she can remember every single show (not just series), commercial or trailer that Barney saw, even a part of, in the 1960s. I like to imagine what Clark's response would be to such a simplistic argument against one of his pet theories.

 And so would I. There is also a point in Fuller's book, I think during the initial UFO sighting, at which Betty exclaims something like "Jeez, Barney, what've you seen in all those 'Twilight Zone' shows you watch?", which I can't put my finger on at the moment. This isn't conclusive evidence of anything, but it is somewhat suggestive.

 MISCELLANEOUS RAMBLINGS

 >In the meantime, agnosticism is not, as Duke foolishly implies, craven cowardice but perhaps the only truly >intellectually honest response. What it says is that we don't have the answers yet, that we're going to have to do a >hell of a lot more work before we do. Why should that make Duke so mad?

 Insofar as the "research" of abductionists is not objective, and insofar as they rely on "techniques" that are irretrievably flawed in execution and untrustworthy in principle (read the literature on "memory retrieval" in child abuse and RSA cases, and the Royal Society of Psychiatrists' report on same that contributed to their decision to outlaw hypnotic and related techniques, and top that with the emerging revisionist literature on repressed memory), then agnosticism about abductions becomes a moral abdication and and intellectual snare and delusion. The best example of a moral sewer in abduction literature so far is "Witnessed", although when I outlined one reason why I hold this view on this List, Linda Cortibalone responded by describing the exercise as 25 paragraphs of nothing. Some minds are impenetrable (but I tried, Lord, I tried).

 Jerome's take on the Linda case - that the evidence for or against it is inconclusive - is an abdication of another kind. Fact is, there is no solid evidence *for* it at all. What doesn't come out of hypnosis can be construed in all sorts of ways besides the cover-all of "alien intervention" (under whose umbrella anything becomes possible, and one never gets to have breakfast for all the impossible things one has to believe before it). And I remain stupified by Jerome's acquiescence, early in Hopkins's "investigation", in the decision not to turn to law- enforcement agencies to pursue "Richard" & "Dan" after Linda's alleged terrestrial abductions.

 The Linda case can be deconstructed to an initial sleep- paralysis-type vision/hallucination, some standard-issue junk extruded from her brain by, and to please, Buddkins - we've all seen Linda's passion for approval and her porcupine response to rejection - and the intervention of two or more dubious characters (and here I do not refer to Messrs Hansen, Stefula and Butler), who may have been victimizing Linda to indulge their own perversity or may have been up to something else, conceivably with her eventual collaboration. What is especially noticeable about the Linda case is the way its exotic details garnered from hypnosis *follow* the revelations of the letters and tapes. None arise first in hypnosis, to be confirmed by missives from the Dodgy Duo. By itself this ought to arouse suspicion of various kinds. But one of the few virtues of "Witnessed" is its exposure of Buddkins' working methods. And what we see is the way he cues and prepares his subjects before hypnosis (against all clinical advice and practice), and encourages further confabulation - retrospective memory - after it.

 Where, in all this, is the chain of evidence that amounts to even the skeleton of a case "for" a real abduction? (There is better evidence to support an allegation that I engaged in sexual congress with Pres. Jimmy Carter in a Sheraton hotel in New York in September 1980. At least there are records to show we both stayed under the same roof on the same night - and I am notoriously fond of peanuts.)

 >Duke, I am going to do you the favor of assuming you are joking when you imply that you take New Age >speculationist Peter Rojcewicz seriously.

 Gawd strewth. I *implied* nothing of the kind and, to be blunt about it, Jerome might occasionally rein in his galloping addiction to inferences. I was simply pointing out that Chief Hard Bull was not the only trained folklorist "in the debate", as Jerome had claimed he was. I wasn't offering my opinion of the others' contributions. For the record, I do find Rojcewicz's work just a trifle on the weird side. But that may go to show nothing more amazing than the truism that high academic qualifications do not guarantee sense or sensibility in any chosen subject. And to that extent, Chief Hard Bull's qualifications and training are irrelevant too, as it's demonstrable that his "Sympathetic Ear" paper is a shambles from top to bottom, while the premises of his 1987 study are flawed beyond repair and his conclusions are not borne out by reference to actual recorded folklore. The full demolition job has yet to be done, but some of us are working on it.

 Yours &c
Polyester D. Medicineshow
Tambourine Man


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