>>Subject: RE: UFO UpDate: Re: Questions for Abductees
>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.
Speculationism, Duke. See below.
>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.]
I confess never to have spoken with Simon, just as Duke here
has failed to speak with the witnesses and claimants whose minds he
claims adeptness at reading. One reporter who did, on several
occasions, said Simon's view of it depended upon what day you asked
him about it. In any event, that's neither here nor there. What
strikes me is that Duke hasn't even read one of the most crucial
documents of all: Walter Webb's investigative report for NICAP.
Instead, he has the bad grace to characterize it as "unchecked
hearsay," when in fact it is, as Webb's work always is, not only
first-rate but first. As I've had occasion to remark earlier, I'd
take one Walt Webb (or Bill Weitzel or Brad Sparks or Jennie Zeidman,
or whomever) over 10,000 speculationists.
Hilariously, Duke claimed in one of his books that Simon was
"entirely unbiased about UFOs as such," when in reality, as Webb
noted in his NICAP field report, he held the subject in such contempt
that he refused the UFO literature Webb offered to loan him. For the
problems inherent in Simon's a prior beliefs, see the discussion on
pages 248-49 of my High Strangeness. For a larger discussion of the
relevant intellectual fallacy, read David J. Hufford's illuminating
The Terror That Comes in the Night (University of Pennsylvania Press,
1982).
>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), Jos=E9 Ant=F4nio
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
>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.
Yeah, right. Thanks for introducing "proleptic" to the
discussion. Of course, if CE3/abduction testimony were wildly at
variance, you would state, just as complacently, that the human
imagination is limitless. For more on that, see below.
>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/aut
hors
>and "The Eyes That Spoke", on the REALL website cited above.
Remember, Duke is a guy who takes Donald Menzel and Peter
Rogerson seriously. Are we to be surprised that Martin Kottmeyer is
far behind? If you want to see just how dopy MK's argument re the
Hill case is, and how amusing it is that Duke refuses to
acknowledging its corpseness, I refer readers to page 250 of my High
Strangeness or to page 291 of my recently published The UFO Book. To
the debunker, no corpse stinks so badly that it shouldn't yet be
brought to the dinner. Nothing, it seems, is going to get in the way
of a speculationist's appetite.
>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.
"No one knows ... to what extent she familiarized herself with
the UFO literature." Speak for yourself, Duke man. You wouldn't know
Sandra Larson from Sandra Dee. Here we have, in a nutshell, what is
wrong with armchair psychosocial speculationism. It's funny, too,
that Duke is regularly accusing others of employing clairvoyant
powers.
In reality, Sandy Larson, on whose case I spent some time and
talked with a whole lot of people who knew her, did not read UFO
literature. She did not read much of anything. There was hardly any
printed matter in her house. Nobody I spoke with had ever seen any
evidence that she knew UFO literature or harbored even an unread
fascination with UFOs. Sandy, who led a difficult life, was focused
on making a living for herself and her daughter. She did it
precariously by waitressing in local honkytonks and dreaming,
unrealistically, of a future as a country singer. She was largely
oblivious to anything outside her little world, whether it was world
events or UFO sightings.
>>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:
Amusing that so committed an advocate as Duke, who finds the
very concept of agnosticism in these matters infuriating, calls his a
"dispassionate eye." Looks more like a wildly flashing one to me and,
I suspect, just about everybody else, even your friends. Certainly
this friend.
>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.
...
What evidence do you have of that, Duke? I love these endless,
baseless speculations, based on nothing at all. The case did not fall
into "the hands of APRO." I was not associated with APRO, and I was
the primary investigator. Leo Sprinkle was brought in at one point,
not by APRO but by Saga's UFO Report, which paid his expenses to fly
from Laramie to Fargo. Leo and I did not discuss UFO cases in Sandy
Larson's presence. Sandy did not know the difference between the
Aerial Phenomena Research Organization and the National Weather
Bureau.
>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.
...
Yup, it is a stretch. Didn't happen. More baseless
speculationism, Duke. ("Speculationism," by the way, not theory; your
guesses don't qualify as the latter.)
>The question returns for Pascagoula ... why did Charles
Hickson opt for space mummies? ...
All of this discussion, it should be noted, far removed from
Pascagoula, Mississippi, and the frightening experience of two
terrified men. In the sort of speculationism in which Duke freely
indulges, human beings exist only as passive narrators. UFO
experiences, often complex and surrounded by intriguing suggestive or
circumstantial evidence, simply become stories from which the
psychosocial speculationists can create new ones, all without having
to stir from the comfort of rural Wales or urban London or wherever
Duke the Clairvoyant is beaming cyber and psychic messages at the
moment.
For the full story, one has to go elsewhere. I have summarized
the case and the surrounding evidence in an entry in my UFO
Encyclopedia. Hickson and Mendez's book -- based in good part on
Mendez's considerable investigation -- is an excellent source.
>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.
Any specific evidence, Duke, that Hickson and Parker were
consumers of UFO literature? Ah, yes, excuse me. Such specific
evidence is irrelevant to the speculationist. I beg pardon. Still, I
beg your indulgence to add that unless you can demonstrate something
like that by more than the sorts of broad, damned-if-they-do,
damned-if- they-don't speculationism you love so much, what follows
here is a waste of everybody's time:
>"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
Which reminds me. I think
I'll indulge myself in a quote from me: "In place of falsifiable
hypotheses, psychosocial speculations substitute a closed system from
which it would be all but impossible for a genuinely new and novel
phenomenon to emerge." Using Duke's logic and "methodology"
(employing that term loosely), we would have no chance ever of
identifying the presence of an extraordinary phenomenon, short of
course of a crash of a UFO, with aliens and abductees inside, into
the Washington Monument. Where evidence doesn't exist, Duke just
makes it up. And if you just make stuff up (e.g., Duke on Larson's
and Hickson/Parker's alleged familiarity with the UFO literature) and
use what you've made up to declare the issue closed ... well, you
might make yourself feel better, and feeling better has a lot to do,
one suspects, with what Duke's about than getting at difficult
truths. Duke has done his idol, pathological scientist Donald Menzel,
who also made up stuff when it suited his purposes, proud. Well,
that's not entirely fair. Menzel was dishonest. Duke is just
blind.
>>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.
>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.
'Fraid not, pal. As I remarked in an early posting, the Larson
case anticipated some crucial features which came into focus in later
years but about which we knew nothing at the time. For example, the
business of being "stuck." That's where the really leading questions
happened, and Jackie, Sandy's daughter, wouldn't budge, and Leo
Sprinkle sure pushed her, even as I sat there quietly cringing.
Naturally, Duke doesn't want to talk about this.
Note the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't nature of Duke's
speculationism. If Sandy's testimony had described humanoids
precisely similar to the Hills', he would have declared that, of
course, she based it on theirs, having seen the Hill movie. But since
she doesn't describe those sorts of beings, Duke hatches up yet
another speculationist solution. See my remarks about the closed
system. Duke wants to make sure that anything he doesn't want to hear
doesn't get a chance to breathe.
What's interesting to me is that around the same time a witness
in Colorado reported an encounter with an entity much like the one
Sandy would describe. I didn't know about the case at the time. Even
if I had, I would not have brought it up to Sandy, certainly not
while the investigation was ongoing. I didn't discover this other
case until a few months ago. Most of us would regard this as curious
and conceivably even supportive. But Duke, with his endless supply of
ever-ready explanations, will take care of it. Never worry.
>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.
What a load of crap. This doesn't even rise to the level of
apples and oranges. This is more like apples and elephants. For one
thing, "plausibly deconstructed" by the same sort of speculationism,
from which nothing is safe, that you employ in the above
discussion.
For another, 70,000 people, many in a state of high religious
excitement (and only a minority of whom saw anything like a "dancing
sun"), are not quite the same thing as three persons driving down a
rural highway, concentrating on immediate, mundane business, UFOs the
last thing on their minds. Reminds me of something else I've written
about such speculationism:
"All claims suggestive of other-than-human intelligences --
however credible or noncredible, whoever the claimant, whatever the
circumstances, whatever the particular details of the story, whatever
evidence may or may not exist -- become the same thing.
Similarities, however slight, matter more than differences,
however substantial. In science one must note similarities, of
course, but one must also isolate differences. Psychosocial
speculators seem to regard differences as irrelevant. They are, in
short, employing arguments that flirt dangerously with
pseudoscientific logic."
>CHIEF EDDIE HARD BULL'S EMPIRICAL APPROACH
>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.
>>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.
Now let's put things in perspective here. Duke, indignant
defender of lost causes, claims that Bullard's empirical approach is
seriously misguided, or his empiricism is misapplied, or whatever.
Meantime, he accepts -- and even quotes -- the likes of Rogerson and
Kottmeyer, whom he apparently regards as paragons of "objective
research." Bullard and I have written separately of these guys'
elemental failures of logic, research, adherence to demonstrable
evidence, or even coherence, not to mention excessive (or even
entire) reliance on speculation.. Yet Duke is drawing them ever
closer, all the while, ever more -- it seems to me -- hysterically,
as if he figures that if he can shout loud enough, he and they will
start making sense.
Bullard develops a testable hypothesis and then seeks evidence
that will confirm or disconfirm it. He is scrupulously fair and
balanced, would never engage in the rhetorical flights of fancy that
characterize Duke's discourse, and comes to conclusions that are
marvels of nuance, moderation, and restraint. At the end he declares,
as he puts it, "the triumph of uncertainty" -- which at this stage
seems an undeniable conclusion, given evidence that is, on one level,
puzzling and, on another, inadequate.
The one testable hypothesis I associate with Rogerson was a
1984 prediction that virtually all CE3/abduction claimants would be
found to possess fantasy-prone personalities. He was entirely in
error, as subsequent developments turned out, but I give him credit
at least for trying to make something approximately scientific out of
what heretofore had looked like the amiably muddle- headed,
stream-of-consciousness mental rambles of a liberal-arts major who'd
read a lot of books on subjects of uncertain or no relevance to UFO
investigation, of which he had no experience to speak of.
>>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 M=E9heust, >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
Here Duke drones on, quoting fellow speculationist Kottmeyer,
on what I call above the spurious association of the "Bollero Shield"
episode with Barney Hill's testimony. I'm simply going to quote what
I wrote in High Strangeness (reprinted in The UFO Book) about this
bit of psychosociological speculationism. I wish to stress here that
Kottmeyer, no empiricist, didn't even inquire of Betty Hill if they'd
seen the show. She denies it, but Duke the Clairvoyant, who always
knows more than mere witnesses, insists she and Barney did, anyway.
What do witnesses know, anyway?
>From High Strangeness (p. 250) and The UFO Book (291-
92):
Another attempt to explain away the Hill encounter, or at least
a portion of it, has been proposed by Martin Kottmeyer, a UFO skeptic
and a student of popular culture. Twelve days before Barney underwent
hypnosis on February 22, 1964, an episode of Outer Limits, a
science-fiction television show, featured an alien with wrap-around
eyes. The alien is given these words of dialogue: "In all the
universes, in all the unities beyond all the universes, all who have
eyes have eyes that speak." Under hypnosis Barney says at one point,
as he encounters the beings on the road, "Only the eyes are talking
to me." Kottmeyer finds this significant and further observes that
Barney said nothing about wrap-around eyes in his earlier conscious
memories.
This is a point, but not much of one. For one thing, Kottmeyer
did not trouble to inquire of Betty Hill... if she and her husband
were in the habit of watching Outer Limits. (When asked by another
writer [me], Betty said, "As for the Outer Limits program --
never heard of it. Barney worked nights. If he was not working, we
were never home because of our community activities. If we had been
home, I am sure this title would not have interested us.") In his
conscious memory, dating back from that night in September 1961 (long
before the airing of the show, in other words), Barney could recall
seeing the beings only from a distance, from which perspective the
precise shape of the eyes may not have been easily apparent. He did,
however, remember vividly the intense stare and the apparent mental
message that the beings were about to capture him. The sense of being
caught in the stare, and of being the recipient of communication in
that state, is consistent with his later testimony.
Under hypnosis, interestingly, Barney says something whose
significance would be apparent only many years later. After
expressing his fears about the talking eyes, he states,"All I see are
these eyes.... I'm not even afraid that they're not connected to a
body. They're just there. They're just up close to me, pressing
against my eyes. That's funny. I'm not afraid."
This aspect of the story was overlooked in virtually all
subsequent rehash and analysis of the Hill case, but eventually
strikingly similar testimony would emerge in the accounts of other
abductees. As the abductees told it, the abductors placed their faces
right up against theirs and stared into their eyes. David M. Jacobs
quotes these words from a woman under hypnosis:
"I'm looking into those eyes. I can't believe that I'm looking
into eyes that big.... Once you look into those eyes, you're gone.
You're just plain gone.... I can't think of anything but those eyes.
It's like the eyes overwhelm me. How do they do that? It goes inside
you, their eyes go inside you. You are just held. You can't stop
looking. If you wanted to, you couldn't look away. You are drawn into
them, and they sort of come into you."
Another investigator, Karla Turner, quotes an abductee who
says, "The ETs like to put their noses almost on my nose, and when
they do this, I just stare into their eyes. Sometimes that's all I
ever see, their eyes, and nothing else that's happening."
Even Kottmeyer refrains from contending that such accounts can
be traced to a few overlooked sentences among the many Barney spoke
during hours of hypnotic testimony. Having exhausted the argument, he
retreats into "psychological symbolisms" which he professes to find
meaningful and others may see as evidence of Kottmeyer's reluctance
to entertain more heretical and disturbing possibilities.
In any event, Kottmeyer's assertions about wrap- around and
speaking eyes, while of some interest, simply do not tell us anything
about the nature of the Hills's experience. Instead we are given a
small detail, taken out of the much larger context of a complex
experience, and asked to think of it as the only issue of
consequence, and then, what is more, to dismiss testimony from other
persons about this same obscure detail as irrelevant to consideration
of its reality status. What is missing in Kottmeyer's argument is a
coherent hypothesis, though it is hard to imagine what that
hypothesis would be.
----end of
quote---
Of course in the
damned-if-they-do, damned-if- they-don't, always-an-out, hermetically
sealed world of speculationist discourse, Duke will say:
(1) Ah! All these other people got this detail from Barney
Hill's testimony.
(2) On the other hand, if nobody else reported it, Duke would
declare: See, obviously a fantasy. Nobody else reported it! (Karl, if
you want to weigh in on the Hill case, here's your chance.)
Which reminds me. As I recall, on part one of his posting, Duke
asserted that nobody besides Sandy Larson had ever reported the
bizarre detail of brain removal. Not so. It figures in other,
extremely obscure abduction claims. Of course: Ah! They got it from
Sandy Larson. But of course if nobody else had reported it ... well,
you get the drift.
You gotta give it to Duke and company: they've jiggered the
rules so there's no way for his pals to lose or anybody else to win.
No matter what happens, it proves what they need to believe.
>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).
Amazing. Duke, whose make-it-up-as-you-go-along methodology
defies belief and whose don't-get-your-hands-dirty approach to UFO
research and investigation is positively medieval, presumes to
lecture everybody who begs to differ of lacking objectivity. I've
said it before and I'll say it again: Give me one good field
investigator over 10,000 armchair gasbags, especially gasbags with
attitude.
Again, readers, for a really splendid discussion of the sorts
of intellectual errors Duke repeatedly indulges in, at ever greater
volume, read David J. Hufford's book. Among other things, Hufford
demonstrates, to devastating effect, what happens when you ignore
what the witness has told you, tell him or her what "really"
happened, then reinvent the testimony so that you can "explain" it;
see especially the chapter "The Psychological Dis-Interpretation of
the Old Hag." Hufford also shows why a keen sense of agnosticism, as
well as a willingness to concede the limits and tentativeness of
knowledge, is absolutely essential in our investigation and
consideration of poorly understood experiential phenomena. Unlike
Duke, Hufford does not engage in phony moral grandstanding on this
issue.
In his vigorous -- some would say relentless -- pretense to
certainty where none exists, Duke is as embarrassingly belief-driven
as some of those he attacks so fervently. One does not know whether
to admire or pity. One does know, however, not to travel down that
lost highway with him.
Yours in favor of saying
"I don't know" when we don't,
