Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
Speaker 1: tell me, Julie. Um, this is kind of a personal question.
Speaker 1: I hope you don't mind me asking, But have you
Speaker 1: ever been abducted by aliens and probed in a UFO somewhere? Oh?
Speaker 1: My goodness, that is personal. Um, No, I haven't. I
Speaker 1: gotta be quite honest here. I would love to make
Speaker 1: something up, but I have not. That's the weird thing.
Speaker 1: Is like like when someone asked me that question, and
Speaker 1: not that they ask every day, you know, just on
Speaker 1: public transportation. But but but you do have to think
Speaker 1: about it because you're like, I don't know, let me
Speaker 1: let me think, because I think we all have I'm
Speaker 1: generalizing tremendously here, but I think a lot of us
Speaker 1: have little like half waking events in our lives, um,
Speaker 1: you know, bits of dream etcetera. That they are kind
Speaker 1: of suspect and means you can't explain, Yeah, things you
Speaker 1: can't yeah, completely explain, and that if you really wanted to,
Speaker 1: you could make a case that they're a part of
Speaker 1: some phenomenon beyond you know, our understanding. No, yeah, I
Speaker 1: think I've mentioned to you before that my grandmother that
Speaker 1: you know, she's got some some more in the family
Speaker 1: about how she and my grandfather saw a little green men.
Speaker 1: But when you start to pick that apart a little
Speaker 1: bit and ask her more questions, or when I had
Speaker 1: asked her those questions, she couldn't really answer them, like
Speaker 1: she didn't really want to talk about it. And then
Speaker 1: I said, well, what about you know, Grandpa and what
Speaker 1: was his deal, what was his take? And she said, well,
Speaker 1: he didn't want to talk about it, which you know,
Speaker 1: you could take that as like just and saying there
Speaker 1: were no green aliens. But I'm not going to get
Speaker 1: into this discussion, right. That's a I had a some
Speaker 1: more thing in my family, had a couple of ants,
Speaker 1: or my mom had two ants, and they live in
Speaker 1: this house together, and one night they apparently saw a
Speaker 1: triangle shaped UFO in the backyard. But they but it
Speaker 1: was again one of these things where they never talked
Speaker 1: about it. You we just hear, like, you know, you know, secondhand,
Speaker 1: it's like, oh, well they saw UFO once, but they
Speaker 1: don't like to talk about it, right. It was the
Speaker 1: night that we shall not speak up right. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: and it seems like you see looking at some of
Speaker 1: the studies that we examined researching this podcast, you do
Speaker 1: you see that a lot with people. There's like a
Speaker 1: lot of the people who have who at least claimed
Speaker 1: to have experienced an abduction experience. And should note that,
Speaker 1: according to uh, some of the numbers we're looking at, UM,
Speaker 1: more people are are prone to say, yes I saw
Speaker 1: a UFO than yes I was abducted by extraterrestrials. But
Speaker 1: but among those that have UM, they tend not to
Speaker 1: want to make a big deal out of it. Have
Speaker 1: been abducted that that claimed to have been abducted? Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're they're they're not necessarily out there, you know, on
Speaker 1: the news, um, you know, pushing for interviews or publishing
Speaker 1: their books. Yeah. Yeah, I mean if you look at
Speaker 1: the stats on it, they're actually they're pretty like uh,
Speaker 1: like Middle America if you're looking at the US, and
Speaker 1: the majority of them don't have UM, any sort of
Speaker 1: mental problems that would indicate that whatever they think they
Speaker 1: saw was a figment of their imagination. So I guess
Speaker 1: when you look at that and you say, well, what
Speaker 1: you know, What's what's going on here? Why do so
Speaker 1: many Americans think that they've been ferried from their bed
Speaker 1: at night? Um and had all these experiences? Why? Why
Speaker 1: do why do you just regular ordinary jo's have these experiences?
Speaker 1: Now you said, did you just say feried isn't? Did you?
Speaker 1: Did I hear that right? Or yeah? I did, says
Speaker 1: start thinking about hades. Okay, Well I think that's that's
Speaker 1: key though, because um, today it's aliens, yes, but in
Speaker 1: previous times and in other parts of the world, it
Speaker 1: kind of depends on the world view. You have lots
Speaker 1: of unexplainable phenomenon or phenomenon that at least defy explanation
Speaker 1: from certain view points, and throughout human history we've attributed
Speaker 1: them to different things. We've attributed them to you know,
Speaker 1: the the you know, the gods interfering when in human lives,
Speaker 1: or you know, it's angels or its fairies, or it's
Speaker 1: which is uh, you know the list is succuby, occupy
Speaker 1: and yeah, we'll get into that in a minute. Um,
Speaker 1: particularly with a dream thing. But your dream no, well,
Speaker 1: no you or your dream? Oh yeah, this has sounded
Speaker 1: very inceptionate. But I've been out more on that later.
Speaker 1: But but yeah, like one of the accounts that I relate, um,
Speaker 1: I like to to look at and uh and this
Speaker 1: is more directly related to UFOs, was in seventeen in Fatima, Portugal,
Speaker 1: a number of people claim to see these lights in
Speaker 1: the sky right right. It was like a huge, a
Speaker 1: huge event, and a lot of that was attributed you know,
Speaker 1: like mass hysteria on one level. But but but the
Speaker 1: interesting thing is that everybody like experienced it as as
Speaker 1: this holy event. It was like the Virgin Mary descending
Speaker 1: into the area and that right, like on a on
Speaker 1: a cloud of light or something, right, yeah, descending into
Speaker 1: this important to mention, highly Catholic area and uh and
Speaker 1: and you know, and these people were not very scientifically
Speaker 1: literate for the most part. Uh. You know, it's nineteen
Speaker 1: seventeen and like you know, rural Portugal. So um, so
Speaker 1: they ended up experiencing this in the form of a
Speaker 1: religious event. Now, if that happened today in uh, you know, Huntsville, Alabama,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking it would be a different experience entirely. Well
Speaker 1: and I was actually thinking about I don't know if
Speaker 1: you recall this, but a couple of years back there
Speaker 1: was a woman in Georgia who claimed to see the
Speaker 1: Virgin Mary in her old refrigerator, like the image burned
Speaker 1: in or something. And I mean hundreds of people made
Speaker 1: the pilgrimage and said, yes, indeed, I can see the
Speaker 1: Virgin Mary and your refrigerator and not in literally but
Speaker 1: on the outside of the refrigerator. And uh. And it
Speaker 1: makes me think of like the just the pattern recognition
Speaker 1: that your brain can't help but see because as humans
Speaker 1: were just hardwired to sit there and say, oh, okay,
Speaker 1: that that I do see that, I do see the
Speaker 1: Virgin Mary. Yeah. I mean it comes down to like
Speaker 1: if you draw, you know, a line and add two dots,
Speaker 1: we see a human face. So it's it's not too
Speaker 1: much more of a stretch to to see the human
Speaker 1: form in anything. And then also, if I'm gonna travel
Speaker 1: a hundred miles on the chance that I'm going to
Speaker 1: see the Virgin Mary and a refrigerator, I'm going to
Speaker 1: see the Virgin Mary and a refrigerator. Yeah, right right,
Speaker 1: And yeah, and there's that excitement, there's that group think. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that or mass hysteria, as you had said in
Speaker 1: a case of fatima. But let's let's look at some
Speaker 1: of the stats. Um that within the numbers we have
Speaker 1: out there regarding alien abduction. Um, tell me about that.
Speaker 1: What is it the is it the roper Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a roper pole which basically says that something like four
Speaker 1: million Americans have had a certain uh indicator or of
Speaker 1: experience that maybe an alien abduction. Right, And this is
Speaker 1: this is a highly suspect um study according to some people. Yeah. Actually, Um,
Speaker 1: the study they dentually did a couple of different studies.
Speaker 1: They did one report specifically in which they pulled four
Speaker 1: thousand people and they asked them five questions. And when
Speaker 1: people answered those questions, that's something like the predominantly four
Speaker 1: out of five people answered yes to those questions. Right now,
Speaker 1: the first question is where you abducted by aliens? Right? No,
Speaker 1: that's the problem with it. There's no like, hey do
Speaker 1: you do you believe in aliens? Have you ever been abducted?
Speaker 1: The questions who are along the lines of have you
Speaker 1: ever woken up paralyzed with a sense of a strange
Speaker 1: person or presence or something else in the room? Okay,
Speaker 1: well I've had that for sure. Yeah, yeah, I have
Speaker 1: to Yeah, I've had you have experienced sleep paralysis, which
Speaker 1: is what that sounds like. Uh. But the problem is
Speaker 1: is that they took the study and they mailed at
Speaker 1: something like one hundred thousand mental health professionals, and the
Speaker 1: foreword was written by a man named John Mack, who
Speaker 1: was a Harvard psychiatrist. So what happened is you've got
Speaker 1: this sense of credibility creeping up in this study, and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden you're talking to psychiatrists about what
Speaker 1: sounds like it could be a real phenomenon. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: and while we were talking earlier, I can I can
Speaker 1: easily imagine if this were to hit the internet today,
Speaker 1: you know, all the variations of it that would would
Speaker 1: trickle down through all the blogs and Facebook's profiles would
Speaker 1: be like would just be stuff like all MG, Harvard
Speaker 1: dude says, alien abductions happened to everyone, right, Yeah, So
Speaker 1: I mean that's that that was one thing that happened
Speaker 1: that certainly could explain some of the uptipic we've seen
Speaker 1: and the last couple of decades of people claiming to
Speaker 1: have had alien abduction experiences, um, when in fact it
Speaker 1: looks to us like it's more of a shared cultural script.
Speaker 1: And if you think about it the incubus, the succubus
Speaker 1: um and incubus and succubus uh. For those of you
Speaker 1: who aren't included into the dungeons and dragons as much
Speaker 1: as we are. Um, this is uh in folk tales
Speaker 1: and stuff, and it can can be very light. But yeah,
Speaker 1: the the the succubus correct wrong is the female demon
Speaker 1: and the incubus or incubi plural is the male demon.
Speaker 1: And these are demons of lust that come to you
Speaker 1: in the night. Right. So if you're a nun or
Speaker 1: let's say a virgin in the mediaval ages, and you
Speaker 1: wake up in the middle of the night and maybe
Speaker 1: during sleep paralysis, you may imagine yourself to be pinned
Speaker 1: down by a succubus or an incubus. So these are
Speaker 1: the sort of cultural MEM's ideas that have evolved into
Speaker 1: what I think now is is the the alien succubus
Speaker 1: if you will, incubus. Yeah, yeah, a number of experts. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Boogeyman or the was one. I have to look
Speaker 1: at my sleep paralysis section of the notes. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: one came up, and I believe this was in the
Speaker 1: and the Susan Blackmore article. She mentioned the Old Hag
Speaker 1: of Newfoundland that presses on people's chest. And I find
Speaker 1: that particularly amazing because I lived in Newfoundland for a
Speaker 1: few years as a child, but was never but it
Speaker 1: was never visited by a strange hag that that like
Speaker 1: stepped in my chest. But when I lived in Tennessee,
Speaker 1: I was pretty sure at once. And this was like rural,
Speaker 1: middle of nowhere Tennessee, during the height of my um
Speaker 1: paranoia about alien abductions, thanks a lot unsolved mysteries, Um,
Speaker 1: I was yeah, and well luckily I was no. I
Speaker 1: think later I was watching a Fause two, which did
Speaker 1: not help at all, but the that the unsolved mysteries
Speaker 1: especially had me terrified. And and I do remember waking
Speaker 1: up kind of like you know again, feeling kind of
Speaker 1: paralyzed and feeling like there was something setting on the
Speaker 1: edge of my bed, and uh, you know, so so
Speaker 1: clearly according to the Roper study, it was it was
Speaker 1: an alien abduction. Yeah. And now you need to go
Speaker 1: to a support group. Yeah, And I need to go
Speaker 1: to see a therapist to find out what the rest
Speaker 1: of it is. Right, One of those therapists on that
Speaker 1: list that received one of the copies of that report
Speaker 1: would be great too. Because I could really substantiate your experience. Now,
Speaker 1: now real quick, back at the Roper poll one last time.
Speaker 1: This is again controversial early nineties, but according to the
Speaker 1: I think these are like two of the people polled
Speaker 1: claimed to have been abducted, abducted by aliens. So the
Speaker 1: extra extrapolating that you get to the premise that four
Speaker 1: million Americans may have been abducted by aliens, which is
Speaker 1: a lot and and and and got and garnered some
Speaker 1: international attention, right, I mean people were wondering what's going
Speaker 1: on in America? Right, yeah, yeah, I mean if you
Speaker 1: actually get back to Susan Blackmore, she was actually put
Speaker 1: on assignment by BBC because BBC said, what what's going on? Why?
Speaker 1: Why are so many people in America claiming to be abducted?
Speaker 1: So she actually, um, I started looking into it. And
Speaker 1: first she started to look at the brain and how
Speaker 1: the brain can trick us. And one of the things
Speaker 1: we've already mentioned is sleep paralysis. Sometimes we become mentally
Speaker 1: alert and we can't move um when we've just woken up,
Speaker 1: and that feels really unsettling, and that can actually uh
Speaker 1: make our body brain d synchronize. And then when that happens.
Speaker 1: We can have hallucinations. So if you think about that too,
Speaker 1: look at the logic behind that. You're in bed, you're paralyzed,
Speaker 1: your brain is fritzing, and all of a sudden you
Speaker 1: think you see something at the end of the bed
Speaker 1: sounds does a start to sound like the cultural script
Speaker 1: that we've been hearing about with aliens. I was in
Speaker 1: my bed, I couldn't move and something was there. Something
Speaker 1: was there. It spirited me off. By the way, this
Speaker 1: is another time the during sleep paralysis is desynchronization when
Speaker 1: you might feel like your floating or you're having out
Speaker 1: of body experience. And this also seems to um I think,
Speaker 1: like a lot of aspects of the abduction experience. It
Speaker 1: really keep keys into a central fear in just our
Speaker 1: animal nature, the fear of something happening to us while
Speaker 1: we're asleep and vulnerable. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Yeah. We've talked
Speaker 1: about this before with animals and how they sleep and
Speaker 1: unit hemispheric sleep, so they shut they can shut off
Speaker 1: one part of their brain and just kind of keep
Speaker 1: one eye on the action. So we've evolved to the
Speaker 1: point where we don't necessarily need to worry about predators, right,
Speaker 1: So you're right, there could be a little bit of
Speaker 1: an evolutionary hangover there. Yeah, to call back to another podcast,
Speaker 1: but you know it's something that you know, our our
Speaker 1: bodies are saying, Hey, you may not be eating in
Speaker 1: your sleep now, but it might happen later. So we're
Speaker 1: just gonna keep that that level of neural fear alive
Speaker 1: for a while. Um. And and like of people tend
Speaker 1: to experience sleep paralysis, so it's uh, it's it's a
Speaker 1: fairly common thing. Yeah. And actually Blackmore didn't stuff there.
Speaker 1: She went and visited a neuroscientist named Michael Persinger, and
Speaker 1: he is someone who believes that out of body experience
Speaker 1: and alien abductions are linked to excessive bursts of electoral
Speaker 1: electrical activity in the temporal lobe. And this is the
Speaker 1: God helmet guy, right, Yeah, he created the God helmet.
Speaker 1: That's what it's called. I think he actually calls it
Speaker 1: the octopus or something like that. Um, it's actually a
Speaker 1: helmet with solenoids that deliver pulses of magnetic field that
Speaker 1: stimulates the temporal lobe and induces the what he thinks
Speaker 1: are the types of hallucinations that people experience. Stuff tied
Speaker 1: to near death experience stuff tied to encounters with the
Speaker 1: supernatural experiences with ghosts, and again ghost is another thing,
Speaker 1: another version well ghosts or another way that we sometimes,
Speaker 1: I think interpret these strange encounters. Yeah, another cultural script
Speaker 1: that we explain, try to explain the things that happened
Speaker 1: in our brain. But she went and she visited him
Speaker 1: and UM, which she learned is that people vary in
Speaker 1: temporal lobe mobility. So some people have a high mobility
Speaker 1: and some people have a low mobility. The high ability
Speaker 1: people have unstable temporal lobes and they exhibit frequent bursts
Speaker 1: of energy. So if you're on the low end, then
Speaker 1: you're not obviously having that much activity with UM with
Speaker 1: those sort of bursts of energy. But the people with
Speaker 1: the high ability that those people have been thought to
Speaker 1: be more creative in the sense that they tend to
Speaker 1: have reported experiences of deja vu to mystical and psychic experiences.
Speaker 1: So the thought that is the thought that there is
Speaker 1: that they're a little bit more predisposed to have some
Speaker 1: sort of imagination in that area that might be tripped
Speaker 1: off by this UM electromagnetic field. And another really interesting
Speaker 1: thing that Blackmore found out about person goer is that
Speaker 1: he reports that strange experiences tend to peek in the
Speaker 1: weeks and the months before earthquakes when magnetic changes may occur.
Speaker 1: So his ideas that that these magnetic changes are influencing
Speaker 1: the temporal lobe and UH and and if you're more
Speaker 1: susceptible to those kind of changes, then who knows what
Speaker 1: you'll see right right? And on top of that, you
Speaker 1: may have UM, you may have post traumatic stress syndrome
Speaker 1: and some sort of delayed UM reaction to that. UM,
Speaker 1: you may have other sorts of traumatic experiences that could
Speaker 1: arise in that sort of environment. And black Moire herself
Speaker 1: actually underwent the experiment, and she indeed felt some sort
Speaker 1: of presence uh during this time. And in fact, she
Speaker 1: was this was really interesting. She wasn't so much freaked
Speaker 1: out by the UM, by the fact that she had
Speaker 1: just put on this helmet with you know, but and
Speaker 1: had this experience, but the fact that Persinger was actually
Speaker 1: messing around the solenoids, and her thought was, well, okay,
Speaker 1: you know, so what if I have this hallucination, what
Speaker 1: about this guy messing around with my magnetic field? I mean,
Speaker 1: how can we look at that? You know that use
Speaker 1: that could someone be an evil genius and and start
Speaker 1: missing with us purposely in some way. So that was
Speaker 1: for experience of that, which is pretty cool. This presentation
Speaker 1: is brought to you by Intel sponsors of Tomorrow. Now.
Speaker 1: It's interesting you mentioned that that the creative, more creative
Speaker 1: people are more prone to some of these temporal lobe anomalies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh and and this this centers on something that
Speaker 1: I've I've thought a lot about, like the idea that like,
Speaker 1: creative people are more more prone to be crazy sometimes
Speaker 1: or at least and sort of self destructively crazy, and
Speaker 1: a lot of that I feel And I'm kind of
Speaker 1: I'm kind of building my own thing here out of
Speaker 1: you know, some some New Age stuff I've I've gotten
Speaker 1: here and some research stuff I've gotten here. But but
Speaker 1: we're less creative people. Both of us are both we're
Speaker 1: both writers, and uh and I feel like as as writers,
Speaker 1: you're you're more prone to create things that are story shaped.
Speaker 1: You want to craft things into a story. And human memory,
Speaker 1: as it turns out, is a lot about crafting a story.
Speaker 1: And uh. And this actually falls back on something that
Speaker 1: Susan Blackbourne mentioned, and that's that we use stored information
Speaker 1: to reconstruct plausible accounts of past events. That that our
Speaker 1: memory is based on taking all this sense data and
Speaker 1: building a little story and then filing that story away.
Speaker 1: And um. And we're humans. So a lot of the
Speaker 1: stories we create, I mean, we're at the center of
Speaker 1: all these stories because we're selfish little creatures. And uh.
Speaker 1: And a lot of these stories are you know, they're
Speaker 1: we can create awesome, amazing stories with these brains of ours,
Speaker 1: but we often create little pathetic stories and little sad
Speaker 1: stories and little you know, poor me stories and uh.
Speaker 1: And so I've wondered at time if at times, if
Speaker 1: if creative people are simply just we're faster at it,
Speaker 1: Like you give us some like mildly depressing stimuli and
Speaker 1: plan we can turn that into a story with us
Speaker 1: at the center of it drop of the hat, where
Speaker 1: someone less creative it would maybe it would take a
Speaker 1: little more effort and a little more determination to make
Speaker 1: a sad story or a like ego inflating story out
Speaker 1: of said stimuli. HM. That's interesting. So it's sort of
Speaker 1: like left handed people have a with the theory is
Speaker 1: that they've got a quicker uptake with information processing. So
Speaker 1: we'd have a quicker story making machine up there with
Speaker 1: our our little monkeys are cranky amount a lot faster. Yeah, huh,
Speaker 1: I've got to think. Well, I think too. With writing,
Speaker 1: there's the compulsion to write, right, And if you think
Speaker 1: about Freud and Um was the compulsion repulsion theory that
Speaker 1: you continue to work thrings through your mind so that
Speaker 1: you can master them. So I don't know. Maybe maybe
Speaker 1: it's just because we're inherently um freaks perhaps, But but
Speaker 1: back to alien abduction, this ties back into that because
Speaker 1: we talked about all right, So let's say I think
Speaker 1: an alien might have said on my bed and I
Speaker 1: was a child, all right, and and I and I'm
Speaker 1: meeting one of the criteria for possibly having been abducted
Speaker 1: by an alien according to the Roper Report. So I
Speaker 1: go to a therapist to try and unlock these uh,
Speaker 1: these memories that are hidden from me, right, okay, right,
Speaker 1: and I'm already you know that memory is not something
Speaker 1: that's locked down or that's completely true. Right again, it's
Speaker 1: just you know, all this stimuli turn turning it into
Speaker 1: little stories. So as as it turns out, it is
Speaker 1: possible to create false memories. Now this this can't this
Speaker 1: is not something that can account for all the abduction
Speaker 1: stories out there. So it's you know, this is just
Speaker 1: one one more item in the how it works. Is
Speaker 1: this because you might, as a creative think already have
Speaker 1: a script in your mind or is it also because
Speaker 1: you're being led by the for the therapists. I think both.
Speaker 1: I think that's that's one thing we mentioned, like if
Speaker 1: you're going to a therapist, you know, to to unlock
Speaker 1: these these secrets uh off your past. For one hand,
Speaker 1: you could go to a therapist that is going to
Speaker 1: be more inclined to help you create that that version
Speaker 1: of events. So it's sort of like the person who
Speaker 1: who claims to have esp and starts to sort of
Speaker 1: hint around and say so your cousin starts with a
Speaker 1: j that, so they're sort of leading leading the witnesses.
Speaker 1: And under hypnosis you can you can implant ideas, and
Speaker 1: you can you can sort of steer the creation of
Speaker 1: so called false memories. So that's sort of that meant,
Speaker 1: that's another layer there that that helps us to explain
Speaker 1: why people are having these memories of these thoughts. Right,
Speaker 1: He's like, the key is that false memories can be
Speaker 1: created through through hypnosis or even through just I mean,
Speaker 1: if you've ever dealt with anybody who like is, you know,
Speaker 1: has a lot of denial going on, you can see
Speaker 1: that we can create visions of versions of reality, you know,
Speaker 1: well whatever will actually fit our needs. And they've actually
Speaker 1: done this in studies before they've recreated they've implanted false
Speaker 1: memories under hypnosis, and they've actually had I remember I
Speaker 1: can't remember what the premise was, but um, what they
Speaker 1: did is they worked with the discipant and then they
Speaker 1: had the family later on corroborate the events and so
Speaker 1: the person so when they brought that up they said
Speaker 1: do you remember that time that dada happened? The person
Speaker 1: would say why yes I do, and would have like
Speaker 1: this full story of what had happened. And it was
Speaker 1: hard for the people who are conducting the studies. After
Speaker 1: they debriefed them, after the study was done, they actually
Speaker 1: said this didn't happen, and they said, no, no, it
Speaker 1: actually did happen. They had to convince them like, no,
Speaker 1: we we implanted this. It's like the old adage if
Speaker 1: you tell a lie what three times five times, then
Speaker 1: you come to believe that lie. And and also for
Speaker 1: you know, anytime you hear a story about an actor,
Speaker 1: like a method actor being a little crazy because they
Speaker 1: become they believe their character or you know, or you know,
Speaker 1: I hear stories all the time of like pro wrestlers
Speaker 1: who confuse their real self with their um there there
Speaker 1: fake um you know on you know, And that's because
Speaker 1: a false memory is conducted is like a little story
Speaker 1: built out of these little pieces. But a real memory
Speaker 1: is also a little story built out of these little pieces.
Speaker 1: So the difference between a false memory and a true
Speaker 1: memory is not that that huge. Okay, So that makes
Speaker 1: sense if you look at a fantasy and reality, we're
Speaker 1: pretty good at distinguishing between the two. But when you
Speaker 1: start to look in the more gray areas of memory
Speaker 1: and reality and these things that are happening in your
Speaker 1: brain while you're sleep and the fact that you've you
Speaker 1: may be more predisposed to creating these sort of stories,
Speaker 1: then you can really start to see how these things
Speaker 1: came together, especially when you look at the cultural factor
Speaker 1: of us telling these stories over and over again to
Speaker 1: explain the unexplainable. So the thing that I want to know, though,
Speaker 1: is why why are abductee is always probed or molested
Speaker 1: or raped, or getting something implanted in their nose or
Speaker 1: I mean, what's what's up with that? Well, on one level,
Speaker 1: I think it. You know, I was talking about earlier
Speaker 1: about how the fear of being attacked or eaten in
Speaker 1: your sleep is pretty basic. Um. I also you know,
Speaker 1: also I think the fear of sexual attack is pretty basic.
Speaker 1: And the fear of something being taken from or put
Speaker 1: into your body. Yeah, I mean, because that's that's basically
Speaker 1: we've had to deal with parasites for for ages. That's
Speaker 1: you know, it's part of our evolutionary history. And a
Speaker 1: lot of these boiled down to, oh, you know, I
Speaker 1: have this abduction then, and oh I have strange scars
Speaker 1: that I can't explain. That's actually one of the the
Speaker 1: questions on the Roper questionnaire was do you have any
Speaker 1: strange scars you can't quite explain? And of course we
Speaker 1: all have a lot of us have scars that are
Speaker 1: that we can't necessarily place. But but the idea is
Speaker 1: that some people began to think that something was taken
Speaker 1: from them. Um you see, um, like some like women
Speaker 1: who have occasionally lost pregnancies, You see, this get incorporated
Speaker 1: into an abduction. So the traumatic experience of that is
Speaker 1: explained to it, right, so that the child was taken
Speaker 1: from them by the by the alien or or countless
Speaker 1: people that that again insist that um, some sort of
Speaker 1: tracking device was placed in their body by by aliens. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and Susan black Mare also points out that when you
Speaker 1: do have sleep paralysis, it's quite possible that at that
Speaker 1: moment you could be experienced some sort of sexual arousal,
Speaker 1: which usually happens during the dream stay, which is when
Speaker 1: sleep paralysis happens. So it's not too far fetched to
Speaker 1: think that you might be having some sort of um
Speaker 1: sex thing dream and then you say, oh, okay, that
Speaker 1: aliens are now part of this and yeah, because yeah,
Speaker 1: because a number of us have I'm sure had these
Speaker 1: types of dreams and they tend to there's a sexual
Speaker 1: aspect and then just a completely looney dream aspect going on.
Speaker 1: So it becomes this like the incubi or the succuba,
Speaker 1: some sort of bizarre and maybe terrifying event that at
Speaker 1: the same time has some sort of sexual charge to it,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, and and it's left to the
Speaker 1: brain to a simple story out of that. Yeah. The
Speaker 1: best example I've seen about this came out in the
Speaker 1: news not too long ago, and uh, there's a farmer
Speaker 1: in China and he claimed to have been visited by
Speaker 1: a female humanoid, which he thought was an alien, who
Speaker 1: was three meters tall, had twelve fingers in braided leg hair,
Speaker 1: and all she wanted to do with make love to him,
Speaker 1: and uh they ended up levitating in in coitus for
Speaker 1: about forty minutes, he claims. And I thought, wow, that
Speaker 1: is really specific. I was like, okay, you know, and
Speaker 1: then levitating again to go back to Um. The hallucinations
Speaker 1: is something that you might feel like an out of
Speaker 1: body experience. Um. Uh so sex, aliens, um, levitation. Um,
Speaker 1: it's probably not happening unless you're dating David Blaine. Well. Well, also,
Speaker 1: you know other sleep things that going uh there. We
Speaker 1: also have false awakenings, which if you've ever seen our
Speaker 1: movie with a dream sequence in it, you know this.
Speaker 1: Uh how this works. The person wakes up, they think
Speaker 1: they're awake, Oh, it's still in the nightmare, and then
Speaker 1: you wake up for real. Um. And and so this
Speaker 1: this is something that that is also really important. You know,
Speaker 1: when we talk about the mind and its ability to
Speaker 1: create a reality, a false reality is that just think
Speaker 1: of your dreams, any dream you've ever had that at
Speaker 1: the time seems real. That's your neural equipment up there
Speaker 1: creating a false reality for you. Now that false reality
Speaker 1: may fade away rather quickly when you enter the waking world,
Speaker 1: but it's proof positive that that it can play all
Speaker 1: sorts of tricks on you, right, and that you have that.
Speaker 1: That's what's so fascinating to me is you've got this
Speaker 1: analog of your reality, and if you look at just
Speaker 1: a little bit closer, it might be a little bit
Speaker 1: off right. The lighting is not quite right, there's something,
Speaker 1: there's something in the dream that you think, Okay, there's
Speaker 1: I'm working through my usual stuff. I'm getting up, I'm
Speaker 1: brushing my teeth. But wait, I'm not. I'm not actually awake,
Speaker 1: which is such a disconcerting moment. It really makes you
Speaker 1: doubt yourself in your mind, I think, which is the
Speaker 1: really interesting part about this, about how we could go
Speaker 1: so wrong in our minds and and misremember things, and
Speaker 1: and back to the the the talk of the sexual
Speaker 1: aspects of the encounters. You do see an alarming number
Speaker 1: of of probings uh showing up in these accounts. And
Speaker 1: we mentioned the American study, but there have also been
Speaker 1: Canadian studies that show a tremendous amount of of alien
Speaker 1: abduction encounters going on. There's a two thousand and one
Speaker 1: University of Ottawa School of Psychology study and they found
Speaker 1: that forty percent of those poll believed in UFOs and
Speaker 1: thirty three believe in abductions. And then this is this
Speaker 1: was really interesting. Two I believe that they had been
Speaker 1: abducted before, which is the same percentage that the roper
Speaker 1: report um. And this was all and this was like
Speaker 1: people profiled in uh the area of Ontario. They're all students,
Speaker 1: all around twenty eight years of age. So may but
Speaker 1: then again, maybe aliens are just really into probing Canadians
Speaker 1: in in the that are in their you know, late twenties. Ye,
Speaker 1: pro bono proctologists from space. You never know. So what
Speaker 1: what are the problems and what's what's the basic problem
Speaker 1: with with the alien abduction in terms of logistics, Well,
Speaker 1: there there's some some pretty obvious ones, being that, you know,
Speaker 1: why isn't our aliens wasting so much time probing Americans
Speaker 1: and or Canadians now China and now China and then
Speaker 1: and why switched to China. Are they like, all right,
Speaker 1: the rectal probing is complete for the North American continent.
Speaker 1: Let's move on to China. Let's see what's going on
Speaker 1: over here. So so there's just some common sense things
Speaker 1: about that. Also, travel through space is is a huge one.
Speaker 1: This is more of a like an alien visitation on
Speaker 1: Earth kind of argument in general. If that's that the
Speaker 1: universe is just vast huge distances and uh, and based
Speaker 1: on what we know about about relativity, traveling these huge distances,
Speaker 1: uh either requires uh, you know it would we just
Speaker 1: require a lot of time and just an enormous uh
Speaker 1: level of patients and uh. And then these you know,
Speaker 1: the different like UFO and encounters that have taken place.
Speaker 1: People have seen these things and recorded them moving in
Speaker 1: ways that that no like living thing that we understood
Speaker 1: stand could possibly survive the g forces in Okay, So
Speaker 1: Terence McKenna, who um was a self described psychoanot um
Speaker 1: and someone who was he was a shame and he
Speaker 1: was all sorts of things. And in fact, I'm not
Speaker 1: doing him um much justice and describing him that way,
Speaker 1: but just for sake of brevity, know that this is
Speaker 1: someone who was really interested in space and in particular
Speaker 1: in aliens and other dimensions. And he would probably take
Speaker 1: issue with that because he seemed to think that d
Speaker 1: m T, which is a drug, was a bit of
Speaker 1: a warm hole to get around all of that. In
Speaker 1: other words, that would connect you directly to some sort
Speaker 1: of hyper space to mension where you could talk to aliens.
Speaker 1: And he was pretty adamant about this. Yeah. I guess
Speaker 1: the big thing here though, is that you can't prove
Speaker 1: any of that with science, and when it comes to
Speaker 1: UFOs and alien abductions, Uh, we're still waiting on the
Speaker 1: evidence to show up for someone to you know, put
Speaker 1: it on the table. Here's the UFO, here's the Yeah, Hey,
Speaker 1: I had a probe and planned to me by an alien.
Speaker 1: Here's the scar. Can you get that out? And it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: I try it. There it is, let's take it out
Speaker 1: and scan. It hasn't happened, right, right, And so that
Speaker 1: also comes down tonal hypothesis. Right. So even though Terence
Speaker 1: mckennam might have had this experience and feels like if
Speaker 1: if we all took d m T we could be
Speaker 1: talking to aliens right now, the burden of proof is
Speaker 1: on the individual, right, Yeah, you can't walk into you know,
Speaker 1: walk up to a scientist and be like, all right,
Speaker 1: aliens are visiting the planet. Proved me wrong, man, You
Speaker 1: can't do that because it's not on them, it's on
Speaker 1: it's the burden of proof is on the person making
Speaker 1: the the the claim that there are aliens visiting, that
Speaker 1: they're aliens probing us and abducting us. Yeah, and it
Speaker 1: should probably be said to the for people who have
Speaker 1: said that they've been implanted with something, there have been
Speaker 1: many people who have said, well, let's get a third
Speaker 1: party in here, and let's get some m R I
Speaker 1: imaging and look at that implant. And nobody so far
Speaker 1: has succumbed to that. Um, so it's we don't. We
Speaker 1: still don't have any sort of souvenir from the aliens,
Speaker 1: so to speak. So I think what all this UH
Speaker 1: is pointing to is the fact that it's just it's
Speaker 1: in mention in our cultural fabric. We can't help it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're encountering strange things we can't understand, and we have
Speaker 1: to build a story out of those events using the
Speaker 1: resources at hand and UH and using the most believable
Speaker 1: that we live in an age that's heavily influenced by science,
Speaker 1: and so the explanations, no matter how fantastic, are going
Speaker 1: to be based in science. Well, and so I'm thinking
Speaker 1: that if you're still not convinced, um, and you love
Speaker 1: coffee table books, that you should know the new coffee
Speaker 1: table book came out. It's called The Art of Close Encounters,
Speaker 1: and it's one hundred and fifty illustrations made by alleged
Speaker 1: abductives describing their experience. And if you've ever seen one of,
Speaker 1: like one of these illustrations, like in a news broadcast
Speaker 1: for an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, they're amazing. I mean,
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm being a little judgmental. If I had
Speaker 1: to draw my own alien abduction experience, it would look
Speaker 1: equally stupid because I am not an artist. So it's
Speaker 1: an entire book of this sort of thing, and I
Speaker 1: can't wait to see it. I bet you'd have a
Speaker 1: really good drawing. But well, now you know what to
Speaker 1: get me for the holidays. Excellent. So if you want
Speaker 1: to learn more about these topics, we have a number
Speaker 1: of resources on the website. We have an excellent article
Speaker 1: by Stephanie Watson Um titled how UFOs work and This
Speaker 1: is an excellent overview of just the UFO phenomenon and
Speaker 1: some and some info about alien abduction. And then I
Speaker 1: recently wrote kind of a follow up to that called
Speaker 1: what are UFOs Really and that deals with some of
Speaker 1: the issues that we discussed here. So together between those
Speaker 1: two articles, I feel like I have a nice complete
Speaker 1: pack it. Also, be sure to check out if you're
Speaker 1: not already, check out Stuff they Don't Want You To
Speaker 1: Know with Matt and Ben. That is a great video
Speaker 1: podcast from How Stuff Works that deals exclusively with unexplained
Speaker 1: phenomena and strange encounters alien territory. Yeah, and and as
Speaker 1: for you guys, if you have any kind of strange
Speaker 1: encounters in your past, alien encounters, if you've seen UFOs,
Speaker 1: if you've been abducted, then by all means please email us.
Speaker 1: We're open minded, We're not gonna make fun of you. Um.
Speaker 1: I think this podcast has has relayed the point that
Speaker 1: that all of these experiences are are valid. That they
Speaker 1: may not actually be happening, but the experiences are a
Speaker 1: real thought. So I'm delighted to hear more about people's
Speaker 1: uh experiences with with alien abduction or UFOs and hey,
Speaker 1: prove me wrong. I would I would love to be
Speaker 1: proved wrong in this. I really would like to believe.
Speaker 1: And then as long as they're not trying to abduct me, yeah,
Speaker 1: and you can. You can email us that Blow the
Speaker 1: Mind at how stuff works dot com, and you can
Speaker 1: also follow us on Twitter and Facebook, where you can
Speaker 1: also find us as blow the Mind. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: You can find these articles and many more every day
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com. For moral this and
Speaker 1: thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
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