A post popped up on the UFO UpDates list today titled, 'NY Times - A Bad Trip Down Memory Lane' and it is all about an article that was published in the NY Times by Bruce Greirson discussing a psychologist that has had a rather checkered career based on her research into "recovered memories". Those are memories that are so painful or traumatic that we bury them and only with the help of professionals can we recover them, but there are two sides to that belief. Some psychologists believe that recovered memories are false and misleading, while others believe that they are factual and helpful in bringing somebody a step closer to the healing process.

The psychologist in question, Dr. Susan Clancy, originally began working with patients that had repressed memories of sexual abuse and when she began to state that perhaps some of the memories of her patients were fabrication or enhanced memories she began to have difficulties. Not only with her patients but even with many of her colleagues because she was dealing with a very volatile situation. Dr. Clancy wisely decided that perhaps she had best continue her research with whether repressed memories were real or not with some other group other than people who had been sexually abused. For the purposes of her research she decided to choose another group that has memories that have to be recovered - victims of alien abduction. But the reason she chose this particular group is interesting... she chose them because of course nobody has ever been abducted by aliens - therefore, all their recovered memories are bogus.

What Dr. Clancy did was reach a conclusion and then set out to prove something else based on a conclusion that she simply could not prove or disprove.

I can hear you clamoring out there "Okay Dave where are you going with this?"

And here it is. For some particular reason this week, I have heard, seen and read about people who claim to have been abducted by aliens. On the popular fictional macro-series, 'TAKEN', one of the characters, Charlie Keys, tells how he fought being taken by aliens by kicking, biting and resisting in every way that he could but yet they still managed to take him. On another fictional program, Star Trek - Voyager, I happened to come across the episode where the crew of Voyager was being used as test subjects by a group of alien creatures and there was a comment that caught my interest. When the aliens were caught, they attempted to defend what they were doing by saying, "Our tests are the most benign tests that we can develop."

But as is usual, truth is always stranger than fiction and here is the reality. There are people out there that believe without a shadow of a doubt in their mind that they have been forcibly taken away by people or creatures that are foreign to this planet and without granting permission or even being given the dignity of being asked, have experiments conducted on them. And I'm not talking about the people who giggle and say things like "Oh, I so love being taken aboard a ship by the aliens, I always feel so nice during it" or the ones that claim they can attract the ships and then get on board themselves. I'm talking about the people that when they're telling you about their experiences, you can see the fear in their eyes, you can hear their voices crack when they RELIVE something as they're telling you about it.

Because here are the facts, most of us have not experienced what these people talk about. Aliens have never abducted me, for one, nor do I ever want to be. And therein lies the problem. You cannot explain the horror of war and what you are feeling to somebody that has never experienced it. You can describe it, you can warn people to never do it if they can avoid it, but you cannot give those people what you are feeling about it and since they can't feel it, it becomes almost unbelievable.

We don't want to believe that people are being taken away, we don't want to believe that our enormous, powerful society is helpless to prevent anything like that happening. So rather than believe it, we ridicule it and we ridicule those that talk about it happening to them.

There is nobody on this planet that can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that aliens are taking people away. However, there is also nobody on this planet that can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is not happening. When people like Dr. Clancy make assumptions because they want to prove some hypothesis about something else, it shows how wrong the scientific process can be.

I don't know if people are being abducted by aliens and I also don't know that they are not being abducted, but what I do know is I would not be so stupid to automatically conclude that people are telling tall tales from the get go.....

But that's just my take on it.....