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