Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Seger.
Speaker 1: And this is the second part of our episodes on
Speaker 1: alien abduction. Now, if you haven't listened to the first part,
Speaker 1: I highly recommend you go back and listen to that.
Speaker 1: That's where we really established the grounding for what we're
Speaker 1: talking about here. What is the common narrative surrounding alien
Speaker 1: abductions and then what is the more common sort of
Speaker 1: scientific explanation for what's going on. We looked at false
Speaker 1: memory and plantation. We talked about ideas surrounding sleep paralysis,
Speaker 1: things like that. This episode is going to be more
Speaker 1: focused on the cultural fabric surrounding the twentie century and
Speaker 1: how it kind of led us to this experience really
Speaker 1: being popular between the sixties leading up to the nineties
Speaker 1: and then kind of fading out after that. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: this is a yeah, this this is a really chewy
Speaker 1: part of this, uh, this exploration of of alien abduction,
Speaker 1: Because on one hand, if you're looking at it from
Speaker 1: a purely skeptical point of view and saying, yes, this
Speaker 1: is just uh, you know phenomena occurring within the brain.
Speaker 1: This is the memory, false memories and memory distortions. Then
Speaker 1: you still have to say, well, how does this narrative
Speaker 1: get stitched together? Where does this ultimately absurd narrative come
Speaker 1: together of these sort of embryonic creatures arriving and flying
Speaker 1: ships and uh in sticking probes into our bodies? Like
Speaker 1: where does this come from? And what does it say
Speaker 1: about the culture from which it emerges? And even if
Speaker 1: you're not skeptical on all of this, if you're more
Speaker 1: of a believer, like even some of the believers, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, voice their concerns about about the various cultural
Speaker 1: and media elements that could be coloring alleged actual abduction experiences.
Speaker 1: There's like a weird feedback loop going on, which came
Speaker 1: first the alien abduction or the science fiction after it?
Speaker 1: And then you know what I kept thinking of was
Speaker 1: that they they talk about how this really started in
Speaker 1: the forties, right, And then I was thinking about the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties was really that big boom in comic books
Speaker 1: for like science fiction e horror kind of comics where
Speaker 1: like Mars attacks style aliens would come there earth, right,
Speaker 1: and like have like, uh, what those like weird ray guns,
Speaker 1: you know, stuff like that. Science fiction was exploding and
Speaker 1: and and also this this rap That's one of the
Speaker 1: big things I think is that the twentieth century is
Speaker 1: the ground from which all of this emerges, and it's
Speaker 1: a time of just such rapid advancement technological advancement, like
Speaker 1: this is the this is the the century in which
Speaker 1: humans split the atom. Uh, this is this century where
Speaker 1: the distances between the various corners of the earth shrank
Speaker 1: and the advent of of of transportation, technology, mass communication
Speaker 1: uh comes together. And then it's it's also just a
Speaker 1: time of enormous social change. And as we all know,
Speaker 1: like when there's enormous social changes that that's occurring, you know,
Speaker 1: rather swiftly. Uh. This this creates um, This can create anxiety,
Speaker 1: this can create this certainly creates hope. But it's going
Speaker 1: to have a cultural effect on people as they're trying
Speaker 1: to come to terms with what the world is doing
Speaker 1: and what the world is becoming and how they fit
Speaker 1: into that world. Right. And the way that these cultural
Speaker 1: effects seem to be taking places through what we referred
Speaker 1: to briefly in the last episode as false memories, Right,
Speaker 1: This is the terminology that's being used to describe this.
Speaker 1: Psychologists believe these stories, they're they're distorting things like childhood
Speaker 1: memories where an alien is standing in for a person
Speaker 1: who abused the the abductee. Right. But then this has
Speaker 1: been countered by abductee as you say, well I never
Speaker 1: experienced child abuse, right, And then you've got false memory
Speaker 1: implantation as an idea that it's not that you're remembering
Speaker 1: something that didn't happen, it's that during the the therapy
Speaker 1: session in which you were trying to figure out what happened,
Speaker 1: somebody accidentally implanted a false memory. There. It's that easy. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: one of the possible explanations that I I I'm not
Speaker 1: saying i'd buy into this. I think it's an interesting
Speaker 1: read on what could be occurring. This comes from psychologist
Speaker 1: Frederick the Malmstrom. Yeah. So, in in this theory that's
Speaker 1: presented by Melmstrom, the abductees are remembering their births and
Speaker 1: the spaceship that they're seeing is actually a symbol of
Speaker 1: their mother's birth canal. Now again, here's another one that's
Speaker 1: been refuted by abductees because they say, well, I want
Speaker 1: under a cesarean birth, So how would I possibly remember
Speaker 1: the birth canal? Why would you possibly have any trauma
Speaker 1: about that? Yeah? Exactly. You know who would have loved
Speaker 1: this theory? Huh giga, Yeah, yes, very much so. But
Speaker 1: but you know, when you break down the science of it,
Speaker 1: I think it has a lot going forward because you
Speaker 1: have to consider newborns have limited visual capabilities. They can't
Speaker 1: see very far or in very much detail, and color
Speaker 1: distinctions barely register. So this stigmatism smears the images that
Speaker 1: they behold. So what do they see when they look
Speaker 1: at their mom's face. They see two large, dark eyes
Speaker 1: and an otherwise blurred and colorless face. So you can
Speaker 1: make the argument that when that you know that that cooing,
Speaker 1: wide eyed baby is looking up at you, mom or
Speaker 1: dad or anybody getting caregiver, they're seeing a gray alien
Speaker 1: staring down at them. And so the argument here is
Speaker 1: the other we're we're drawing on that that old memory,
Speaker 1: that's that's sort of rising to the surface. Uh, perhaps
Speaker 1: in combination with any number of the scenarios that we
Speaker 1: discussed in part one, something to remember the next time,
Speaker 1: like a friend or a co worker brings in a
Speaker 1: newborn and everybody just huddles around that newborn and just
Speaker 1: you know, gets right on top of it in its
Speaker 1: personal space. You are potentially creating a future alien abductee experience. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that kid's gonna end up just being addicted to XCOM
Speaker 1: based on what he experienced here today. But actually getting
Speaker 1: into the false memory implantation aspect here, it's important to
Speaker 1: recognize that hypnotherapists that are involved in this, they're actually
Speaker 1: earnest about their desire to help a patient. I think
Speaker 1: it's really easy for us to say, like either or
Speaker 1: the patients lying or the hypnotherapist is like maliciously manipulating them. Right,
Speaker 1: that doesn't seem to be the case. But experimental psychology
Speaker 1: is shown that it's actually relatively easy to implant false
Speaker 1: memories in an individual's mind, and in the study, researchers
Speaker 1: were able to implant false memories of getting lost in
Speaker 1: a shopping mall in participants. Another two thousand and one
Speaker 1: study showed that even when events were unlikely, for instance,
Speaker 1: an abduction by aliens, they can be implanted as false memories.
Speaker 1: Suggestive information presented to the participants can actually increase the
Speaker 1: plausibility of us Supposedly imply possible event to them. And
Speaker 1: this was further shown in a two thousand nine study
Speaker 1: by Utgar, Candele, and merkel Bach oh and also Wade
Speaker 1: for four authors there, and they showed that you can
Speaker 1: implant false memories of alien abduction by paying special attention
Speaker 1: to the way that participants described the event during an interview.
Speaker 1: And what they would do is they this also seems
Speaker 1: crazy to me. Uh. They used children as participants, and
Speaker 1: I wrote in the notes what they would take kids,
Speaker 1: and they showed them the event during an interview. They
Speaker 1: showed them these fake newspaper articles and that would allow
Speaker 1: them to implant memories of alien abduction being a thing.
Speaker 1: Then the kids, these were seven to twelve year olds,
Speaker 1: and thirty three percent of them developed false memories during
Speaker 1: the first interview. Then they did a secondary interview, another
Speaker 1: six percent developed false memories. The younger children were more
Speaker 1: likely to develop false memories and the older chidren were
Speaker 1: But then get this, children were equally likely to develop
Speaker 1: a false memory about alien abduction as they were to
Speaker 1: develop a false memory about choking on candy. So they
Speaker 1: had a control group where they were trying to also
Speaker 1: implant memories of them choking on candy It worked the
Speaker 1: same way, so the unlikelihood didn't seem to be a factor.
Speaker 1: Why do you have to just throw in from my
Speaker 1: own experience that the memories of small children. It's strange
Speaker 1: because I'll take my my my son to school, pick
Speaker 1: him up, and I'll say, hey, what what do you
Speaker 1: do today? I don't know, I don't remember, like just
Speaker 1: note and then he'll say, hey, do you remember that
Speaker 1: dead spider we found like three years ago? You know,
Speaker 1: bring up this this this minute memories like why are
Speaker 1: you believe? Why do you remember that? Why are you
Speaker 1: remembering it now? And then there's also there also be
Speaker 1: there also incidents where there will there will be false memories.
Speaker 1: Either it will be something that he doesn't remember but
Speaker 1: we have told him about, and then he ends up
Speaker 1: he thinks he has a memory of it, or will
Speaker 1: be some thing that he just kind of completely fabric
Speaker 1: like he knows it happened, and then he has a
Speaker 1: memory that he's put together off it. And I think
Speaker 1: if we, if each of us thinks back to our
Speaker 1: earliest memories, we run into that that situation. You have
Speaker 1: to ask yourself, is this something that I actually remember happening?
Speaker 1: Is this something that my parents told me about, and
Speaker 1: I'm kind of I've made a memory out of being
Speaker 1: told what I should have experienced. Yeah, I've been thinking
Speaker 1: about this lately. Um, My sister's grandfather in law just
Speaker 1: passed away, and she's been trying to explain to her
Speaker 1: three year old son they live in that they lived
Speaker 1: in the house with her grandfather in law, and she's
Speaker 1: trying to explain to her son where papa went. And
Speaker 1: he's three. He doesn't have an understanding of the difference
Speaker 1: between life and death, right, he's still struggling with that concept.
Speaker 1: So she says to him, Papa is in heaven. Now, um,
Speaker 1: you know that it gives him an idea of like, Okay,
Speaker 1: there's this physical place called heaven that that he went to.
Speaker 1: I'll see him again there or something like that, right,
Speaker 1: And but she's having a really hard time with it.
Speaker 1: And then he'll he'll occasionally like walk in the living
Speaker 1: room and be like, where's Papa, And then he'll go,
Speaker 1: He'll he'll self correct and he'll go, oh, wait, that's right,
Speaker 1: He's in heaven. And then just kind of, you know,
Speaker 1: trod on and keep doing his little kids stuff, and uh,
Speaker 1: it keeps making me think, like, well, from my experience,
Speaker 1: I don't really retain any memories from that age, But
Speaker 1: is this something that he's going to remember later on
Speaker 1: in his teenage years and he'll be like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: like I had this firmly embedded idea of heaven as
Speaker 1: a as a place on earth kind of intended. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, I actually I know somebody who had you know,
Speaker 1: similar everybody has situations I think where and I'll remember
Speaker 1: the family dies while the child is too younger really understood,
Speaker 1: and so they told him all of that, you know
Speaker 1: this individuals in the sky now, like he went to
Speaker 1: the sky. But I think it ended, if I remember correctly,
Speaker 1: it ended up making the child a little afraid, more
Speaker 1: afraid of roller coasters because they did not want to
Speaker 1: go into the sky. That this guy was like where
Speaker 1: everybody who had died? So creepy idea. Yeah, well, alright,
Speaker 1: So all of this stuff leads scientists to the conclusion
Speaker 1: that the improbability of an event isn't actually a leading
Speaker 1: factor in false memory implantation success. And this leads us
Speaker 1: back to good old McNally and Clancy, who we talked
Speaker 1: about a lot last episode. They researched memory function in
Speaker 1: women who believed they had recovered memories of childhood's sexual abuse,
Speaker 1: and they actually found that such victims were more likely
Speaker 1: to create false memories of non traumatic events when they
Speaker 1: were visiting in the laboratory then women who had always
Speaker 1: remembered being sexually abused or women who had never been abused.
Speaker 1: So to study this further without unethically inserting false memories
Speaker 1: of trauma into people, this is why they got into
Speaker 1: the alien abductee study business. So they said, let's amass
Speaker 1: a group of people who have these memories but that
Speaker 1: they're unlikely to have actually occurred. Uh. And I want
Speaker 1: to note here to very little of the research on
Speaker 1: alien abductions actually focuses on the practice of the hypnotherapy itself.
Speaker 1: Um So the like broader review of all this stuff
Speaker 1: essentially recommends, look, we need to do further research until
Speaker 1: the dynamics of hypnotherapy before we really understand the full
Speaker 1: parameters of what's happening here now. In part one of
Speaker 1: this two partner on alien abduction, we we talked a
Speaker 1: good bit about media scripts cultural scripts, the idea that
Speaker 1: when something strange occurs, you have these pre existing narratives
Speaker 1: to draw upon to explain it, be it something to
Speaker 1: be you know, magical ferries or ghosts or alien abduction,
Speaker 1: and uh, there's a there's actually an interesting argument here that, like,
Speaker 1: it's easy to get lost in the space age sci
Speaker 1: fi aspects of alien abduction and think, well, this is
Speaker 1: something wholly new. This is something that they just you know,
Speaker 1: appears in the wake of the Second World War and
Speaker 1: becomes the new cultural script for paranormal experience. But it
Speaker 1: has a lot in common with older models as well.
Speaker 1: And this is explored in a in an article titled
Speaker 1: He's making me feel things in my body that I
Speaker 1: don't feel. This is by Patricia Felicia Barbado and it
Speaker 1: was published in the Journal of American Culture the subtitle
Speaker 1: The Body as Battleground in Accounts of Alien Abduction. So
Speaker 1: she makes the case that the late twentieth century alien
Speaker 1: abduction stories essentially powered by the seventeenth through nineteenth century
Speaker 1: American obsession with the Native American captivity narrative. So, I
Speaker 1: don't know if everyone's familiar with this. If you've watched
Speaker 1: a lot of Westerns, you may have come across this,
Speaker 1: And certainly if you've if you've studied history. I imagine
Speaker 1: this has come up on stuff you missed in history
Speaker 1: class o our sister podcast, Uh here at how stuff works.
Speaker 1: But basically, you had you had these these in students
Speaker 1: where and then the resulting tales and of course fictionalizations
Speaker 1: in many cases where a Caucasian woman was abducted and
Speaker 1: brutalized by by Native American tribes and in many cases
Speaker 1: absorbed irreversibly into their culture. I want to say this
Speaker 1: comes up in the the the John Wayne movie The Searchers.
Speaker 1: I've never seen The Searchers, but I immediately jumped to
Speaker 1: a more recent movie Bone Tomahawk, which you and I
Speaker 1: both sort of enjoyed. Yeah, that plays on a similar narrative,
Speaker 1: the idea that the you know, the the cultural other,
Speaker 1: the barbaric cultural other, has come and taken someone away.
Speaker 1: And there's a lot of fictionalization there. But of course
Speaker 1: there were incidents of of things like this occurring, and
Speaker 1: then there were the the the idea of reclaiming someone
Speaker 1: from that ended up being far more problematic because either
Speaker 1: they were irreversibly assimilated into that culture to varying degrees,
Speaker 1: or there was just there was at the very least
Speaker 1: a lot of trauma had taken place. Uh maybe the
Speaker 1: most like popular film that people would be familiar with
Speaker 1: that that that this trope showed up in his Dances
Speaker 1: with Wolves, because, um is Mary McCormick. Her character his Caucasian,
Speaker 1: and she's been living with a native tribe since she
Speaker 1: was a kid, like basically raised among them. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: so I either haven't seen her, it's been so long
Speaker 1: that I don't remember anything about it. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: think that that very much plays on it. And the
Speaker 1: thing is that these there were accounts of these abductions
Speaker 1: published in the thousands, so this is like the Boogeyman
Speaker 1: of that time. Yeah, yeah, it was everywhere. And um
Speaker 1: so the idea here is the captive woman in these
Speaker 1: accounts serves as a kind of physical battleground for the
Speaker 1: premise of noble white superiority over the you know, the
Speaker 1: dark savage tribal other from beyond the frontier. So the
Speaker 1: racist boundary here only exists artificially, of course, but the
Speaker 1: captivity experience tears apart the fiction in no time. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So here's what Barbados has to say. Quote. But while
Speaker 1: accounts of alien abduction present us with stark racial, spatial
Speaker 1: and culture world differences human and alien, Earth and outer space,
Speaker 1: technology and nature that are reminiscent of Indian captivity narrative.
Speaker 1: They do so only to turn our attention to the
Speaker 1: way that the captive's body completely fails to impose boundaries
Speaker 1: between them. It's interesting like that, like we used to
Speaker 1: other human beings that were from different cultures, and then
Speaker 1: we hit this point in the twentieth century where I mean,
Speaker 1: it's not to say that we don't demonize other people,
Speaker 1: because we certainly still do, but that we became sort
Speaker 1: of more of a you know what if you want
Speaker 1: to call it global village enough that you could sympathize
Speaker 1: with most other cultures, so then the other ing had
Speaker 1: to turn into something outside of Earth. Yeah. So I
Speaker 1: mean that's that's just one one example of the kind
Speaker 1: of like deep cultural and analyzes that that they can
Speaker 1: and do take place concerning the alien aductive narrative, like
Speaker 1: not only where does it come from, but why does
Speaker 1: it have so much so much power over us? I mean,
Speaker 1: you get into this a lot with with fiction, right
Speaker 1: where you have like revenge tales. Revenge tails have always
Speaker 1: been popular. The revenge tale itself hasn't really changed, but
Speaker 1: it we just continually update it for our our modern
Speaker 1: our modern world and whatever the latest technological or cultural
Speaker 1: trend happens to be. Yeah, this is true. I think
Speaker 1: you could probably like look at any year's worth of
Speaker 1: films and you can like drop a pin and be like, Okay,
Speaker 1: there's the revenge tail of the year, right, Like I
Speaker 1: guess this year's would be like Atomic Blonde. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: haven't seen it yet, but but it just me I
Speaker 1: want to see a like a version of The Searchers
Speaker 1: with alien abduction, but not cowboys versus aliens. Something I
Speaker 1: think you. I think you just like like opened up
Speaker 1: a bank account for somebody in Hollywood. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: on that note, let's take a break and when we
Speaker 1: come back, we will we'll dive deeper into the angst
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century. All right, we're back. So there's
Speaker 1: this twenty sixteen Boston Globe article that had a really
Speaker 1: interesting take on the alien abduction phenomena, and it found
Speaker 1: the following themes were essentially social currents that all fed
Speaker 1: into alien abductions over the last few decades. The first
Speaker 1: one we already mentioned space exploration in the fifties and sixties.
Speaker 1: Then you've got the Cold War that's inspiring a fear
Speaker 1: of invasions. You get stuff like invasion of the body snatchers, etcetera.
Speaker 1: And then out of body experiences that we were having,
Speaker 1: whether it be from mysticism or from drugs. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean when you factor in the rise of the
Speaker 1: counterculture movement and psychedelic experience on top of all of
Speaker 1: this totally, and then the nineteen eighties fear of strangers.
Speaker 1: And this is something that was easy for me to
Speaker 1: forget because you know, we grew up in the eighties,
Speaker 1: but obviously it wasn't like that before then, right there. Uh,
Speaker 1: But there were so many stories about child abduction and
Speaker 1: sexual molestation being reported in the news that this became
Speaker 1: like a common cultural narrative. So you get all four
Speaker 1: of those together, you you, you know, stir them up
Speaker 1: in a pot together, and you get a perfect brew
Speaker 1: for alien abduction stories. Now here's an interesting thing again,
Speaker 1: X Files fan over here. I didn't know this. Apparently
Speaker 1: Chris Carter was at San Diego Comic Con one year.
Speaker 1: Chris Carter is the guy who was the showrunner and
Speaker 1: creator of The X Files and he said, you know
Speaker 1: why the show stopped working, It was because of nine eleven,
Speaker 1: And he said the mood wasn't right anymore, that like
Speaker 1: there was something about nine eleven that made the like
Speaker 1: the magic of the X Files stick that was gone.
Speaker 1: I don't know, I've watched a lot of X Files.
Speaker 1: I think the show would pretty much petered out. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not like we we abandoned magical the narratives after exactly. Mean,
Speaker 1: certainly there was probably more of a mean, did did
Speaker 1: stuff like uh, what was it twenty four? Did that
Speaker 1: come out post nine level? Yeah? I'm pretty sure. So
Speaker 1: maybe there was. I could see where there was an
Speaker 1: opening for for stories that sort of you know, delivered
Speaker 1: the type of content that might resonate more in the
Speaker 1: wake of nine eleven. But certainly we still were into aliens,
Speaker 1: were still into ghosts, and I mean all the ghost
Speaker 1: Hunter shows seemed to have come sprung up in the
Speaker 1: wake of very much. Did you ever watch that show Fringe?
Speaker 1: I I watched a little of it. It looked it
Speaker 1: was one of those shows that that looked really cool,
Speaker 1: but I just didn't get hooked in it. It was fun.
Speaker 1: It took me a while to like really get cemented
Speaker 1: into it. But once I'd say, like after the second season,
Speaker 1: I was like a die hard follower of it. But um,
Speaker 1: that show did a good job of taking nine eleven's
Speaker 1: trauma and mixing it in with the like general paranormal
Speaker 1: stuff that the X Files was playing around with. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: And I think that that is probably part of why
Speaker 1: I was successful. But also I have to say, Chris
Speaker 1: Carter uh just wasn't writing great stuff anymore. Man. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you saw any of that X Files revival last year,
Speaker 1: like all the episodes that he wrote were just like
Speaker 1: cringe worthy, Whereas like the other guys who came back
Speaker 1: to some of the best work, like Darren Morgan who
Speaker 1: was talking about Last Time, Glenn Morrigan, and um, I
Speaker 1: believe it's James Wong. Okay, Well, you know another source
Speaker 1: that that I was looking at in terms of figuring
Speaker 1: out the cultural residents of all of this, uh is
Speaker 1: a wonderful paper and this is available online if you
Speaker 1: look it up. It's called is It Tomorrow or Just
Speaker 1: the End of Time? UFO Culture and Cultural Anxiety, And
Speaker 1: this is by Connie Smarris and she's primarily a photographer
Speaker 1: and video artist based out of l A. But she
Speaker 1: put together this wonderful paper that it references a lot
Speaker 1: of like deeper literature on it, but I think she
Speaker 1: does a wonderful job which is sort of summarizing what's
Speaker 1: some of what might be going on. Yeah, I read
Speaker 1: over part of this too, and from my perspective, it
Speaker 1: looked like she was doing the opposite of what the
Speaker 1: literature review was in academia. She was reviewing the phenomena,
Speaker 1: but not looking at all the like academic articles, but
Speaker 1: more looking at the speriential narratives and compiling them together.
Speaker 1: So she was part of the article she was pointing to.
Speaker 1: Intruders Foundation funded Roper Pole in Truders Foundation is a
Speaker 1: you know, a group that was you know, aligned with
Speaker 1: alien abduction experiences and you know, the study of them, Uh,
Speaker 1: anyway to determine the percentage of the US population abducted
Speaker 1: by aliens and some of the we already hit on
Speaker 1: some of the big findings that have come out over
Speaker 1: the year in terms of percentage of the population that's
Speaker 1: expressed these things. But here's some of the more particular
Speaker 1: findings that she highlights here. It's a largely industrialized northern
Speaker 1: hemisphere phenomenon mostly a US phenomenon. Abductees are mostly white
Speaker 1: in middle class and uh, you know, it's worth noting
Speaker 1: again that the first major case of alleged alien abduction
Speaker 1: was that of Barney and Betty Hill. This was an
Speaker 1: African American male and a white female, right, As we
Speaker 1: mentioned last episode, that plays against the stereotype, right yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And because for one thing, the majority of abductees are
Speaker 1: when are actually women, though most of the movies and
Speaker 1: TV representations involved men, And of course that just gets
Speaker 1: into the you know, the sort of the sexist nature
Speaker 1: of our our narratives, especially for most of the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: If you're gonna make a TV show or a movie
Speaker 1: about it or a book, it's going to be based
Speaker 1: around a male um male character, right yeah, yeah, but
Speaker 1: that ends up sort of skewing your public idea of
Speaker 1: who's experiencing these in the real world. And there's also
Speaker 1: the like this is related to the shark thing we
Speaker 1: were talking about last time, there's like a kind of
Speaker 1: like gross, I don't know, voyeurism about like the alien
Speaker 1: abduction experience being performed on a woman, right in the
Speaker 1: same way that like a woman in a bikini getting
Speaker 1: eaten by a great white shark is somehow voaristic as well.
Speaker 1: I can't quite put my finger on it. There's something
Speaker 1: weird going on there. Well, it's like you're taking a
Speaker 1: you're taking a potentially you know, unset only in an
Speaker 1: unsavory real world scenario, and you're like, you're just subbing
Speaker 1: in a fantastic element. So you're left with kind of
Speaker 1: the same traumatic event. To your point that reproduction is
Speaker 1: a common theme in these abduction tales. They might be
Speaker 1: like a pregnancy tests, some sort of a false pregnancy,
Speaker 1: egg harvesting, uh, you know, some sort of reproduction tinkering,
Speaker 1: which again that that is something that is falls in
Speaker 1: line with you know, incubine and succubie accounts and folklore
Speaker 1: you know, throughout European history. But but in any rate,
Speaker 1: there's the there's also this standardized daily and description. We've
Speaker 1: talked about, this sort of embryonic looking grays. You see this, uh,
Speaker 1: this use of telepathy, especially between like the leader alien
Speaker 1: and the subject. The anal probing of males, which we
Speaker 1: haven't we haven't spent a lot of time with that.
Speaker 1: I feel like you gotta work up to anal probing. Well,
Speaker 1: there's also Connie Samaris's article on this. The wording is
Speaker 1: wonderful and how she she talks about how that it's
Speaker 1: so we're so specifically worried about male abductees being probed,
Speaker 1: and yet there's very little talk about female abductees being probed. Yeah, exactly. Uh. Now,
Speaker 1: on top of the probing, sometimes there's this element of
Speaker 1: seduction by the examiner alien And most of these points
Speaker 1: out are vastly heterosexual in nature, like to the point
Speaker 1: where it would seem, based on these accounts that aliens
Speaker 1: never abduct like a you know, a gay, lesbian or
Speaker 1: bisexual individual. But so so we have to sort of
Speaker 1: factor that into the whole you know, psychoanalysis of what's
Speaker 1: going on uh PTSD nightmares afterward, we've already touched on that. Um.
Speaker 1: This is interesting the idea that sometimes these run in
Speaker 1: the family, that there's like a family legacy of alien
Speaker 1: abduction scenarios. So it's like Jaws, like that the shark
Speaker 1: keeps coming after the same family members. Yeah, Like, I
Speaker 1: this is something I want to see an alien abduction
Speaker 1: fiction more the idea that it runs in the family,
Speaker 1: like it puts a weird spin on it. Then there's
Speaker 1: the introduction of the idea that aliens will eventually bring
Speaker 1: about wide sweeping social change and this is This is
Speaker 1: interesting because it brings up the idea like, is this
Speaker 1: in a way you know that this is this is
Speaker 1: taking the trauma and the nightmare and twisting it into
Speaker 1: something more hopeful, something fantastic, but also getting into this
Speaker 1: idea that is that the only way that that sometimes
Speaker 1: we can perceive sweeping social change, and it has to
Speaker 1: come from the outside and it can't come from within.
Speaker 1: This reminds me of a quote that I've mentioned on
Speaker 1: the show before, uh, and I'm having a hard time
Speaker 1: placing where it came from, so sorry listeners, But Uh,
Speaker 1: it goes something like this, it's easier for us to
Speaker 1: imagine an apocalypse than it is for us to imagine
Speaker 1: a positive society that doesn't exist within capitalism, right, Like,
Speaker 1: it's so hard to imagine something that's outside of our
Speaker 1: frame of reference that the only, no, the only way
Speaker 1: we know how to imagine it is, uh, is by
Speaker 1: destroying it. Oh. I know it was Frederick Jamison, Who's ah, well,
Speaker 1: you know this. This factors into a lot of the
Speaker 1: writings about alien abduction and certainly the scenarios where it
Speaker 1: takes on this hopeful uh, you know, messengers from beyond um,
Speaker 1: you know, coming here to make the world a better place.
Speaker 1: That one of the other big elements of the twentieth
Speaker 1: century is this angst over what we're doing to the planet,
Speaker 1: over over pollution, over over the the threat of nuclear annihilation.
Speaker 1: This all comes to hang over even the average individual's head.
Speaker 1: And then how do we how do we process that,
Speaker 1: and how do we how does it factor into these experiences?
Speaker 1: You know what I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go down
Speaker 1: a little bit of a sidebar here. But that's why
Speaker 1: we did two episodes. Uh, I've been experiencing this lately,
Speaker 1: and I haven't I haven't felt this way since like
Speaker 1: the I guess early nineties, the Cold War fear of
Speaker 1: the nuke, you know, like that was something that I
Speaker 1: thought we were done with that I had kind of
Speaker 1: gotten to a point in my consciousness where I wasn't
Speaker 1: always worrying like, well, it could just happen at any time,
Speaker 1: you know, and like um, the fear of nuclear winter
Speaker 1: and all all these things that like, you know, you
Speaker 1: saw a lot of this manifest in nineteen eighties films,
Speaker 1: and now with all this stuff ramping up with North Korea, uh,
Speaker 1: between the United States and North Korea. For those that
Speaker 1: are in American back and forth, there's our media is
Speaker 1: very much like, oh my god, like they've got I
Speaker 1: c B M S. What's going to happen? You know,
Speaker 1: Like I even like talking to my mother, she was like, well,
Speaker 1: you gotta be careful where you live in the United
Speaker 1: States now. You don't want to live on the West
Speaker 1: Coast because you could just get bombed by the North Koreans.
Speaker 1: And I was like, whoa, Like, where did that come from?
Speaker 1: You know, um, we're right back there. Yeah, well, I
Speaker 1: mean part of the disturbing answer is that, you know,
Speaker 1: they're the risk of nuclear war never went away, It's right,
Speaker 1: has It has remained this whole time, and and there
Speaker 1: have been there have been, you know a number of
Speaker 1: very committed individuals working around the world to try and
Speaker 1: get us to a better place where it's it's it's
Speaker 1: less likely to occur. But the reality is that we
Speaker 1: we have these weapons, we have weapons systems set up
Speaker 1: to to make it happen at the at any moment,
Speaker 1: and those the humans and the systems are both both falliable. So, UM,
Speaker 1: I wonder if you're going to start to see a
Speaker 1: resurgence in uh, those kind of fears though again in
Speaker 1: our fiction, I mean, yeah, I would. It will be
Speaker 1: interesting to see if it's just a if it's a
Speaker 1: complete rehash of how we manifested those fears before, if
Speaker 1: there is some sort of new spin on it that
Speaker 1: you know that we can't quite expect. Alright, Well, on
Speaker 1: that note, on the note of nuclear annihilation, let's take
Speaker 1: another break, and when we come back, we will continue
Speaker 1: to discuss uh, this this paper by Connie Samaris and
Speaker 1: uh and just the overall alien abduction scenario. Alright, we're back.
Speaker 1: So uh. Samaris brings up two key individuals, um and
Speaker 1: there their alien of abduction abduction researchers, And I wasn't
Speaker 1: really that familiar with either of them, but they're both
Speaker 1: fascinating in their own rights. So the is Bob Hopkins.
Speaker 1: This is a guy who advocated the physical reality of aliens,
Speaker 1: Like he believed that alien abductions were actually happening and
Speaker 1: that we should be studying and listening to the individuals
Speaker 1: who experienced them and you know, figuring out how to
Speaker 1: help them. But he also, interestingly enough, believed that media
Speaker 1: representations could be coloring the experiences as well, which I
Speaker 1: find interesting because it's, as we've already mentioned, we want
Speaker 1: to we tend to want to fall into a you know,
Speaker 1: a skeptic or believer uh dichotomy here, the idea that
Speaker 1: either alien abduction is happening or it is this you know,
Speaker 1: skeptical model where people are having false memories, et cetera.
Speaker 1: And even Bud Hopkins, who's more of a literalist here
Speaker 1: is or was saying that, well, hey, we could have
Speaker 1: this situation where it's actually happening, but then our sci
Speaker 1: fi is coloring the experience as well. And then there's
Speaker 1: this other individual, and this guy is really fascinating John E. Mac. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this guy is all over the alien abduction literature, and
Speaker 1: rightly so. He had a bestseller in the early nineties
Speaker 1: about the research that he was doing. We We're gonna
Speaker 1: go in a lot into Johnny Mac. Yeah. So he
Speaker 1: was a psychiatrist and a parapsychologist. I mean, he kind
Speaker 1: of started out as more of a pure skeptic, but
Speaker 1: then as he he moved along, he's researching, he's talking
Speaker 1: to individuals. He ends up taking on this more of
Speaker 1: a this more of the spiritual model of what's happening.
Speaker 1: Is he's seeing it as a spirit spiritual experimental phenomenon
Speaker 1: in keeping with past quote visionary encounters experienced by humans
Speaker 1: around the world, which on one hand is saying, you know,
Speaker 1: that's what we've been saying, like clearly we've been having
Speaker 1: the same experiences throughout human history, and we just wrap
Speaker 1: it up in different rappers. But he ends up saying
Speaker 1: that there's something there is something truly amazing happening beyond
Speaker 1: like human understanding. Mac is one of these figures we
Speaker 1: come across these characters occasionally. They're sort of like stuff
Speaker 1: to blow your mind icons, like the sort of legendary figures.
Speaker 1: And he actually passed away in two thousand and four,
Speaker 1: but I'm thinking of like Sasha Shulgun or John C.
Speaker 1: Lily or Jack Parsons. Right, he's like these thinkers that
Speaker 1: were like they had one leg in science and one
Speaker 1: leg and something else, right, And he's kind of like that, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he really has a leg in both both areas. He's
Speaker 1: able to I think piss off people Bethides exactly. So
Speaker 1: I ran across a Nova interview with him, and he
Speaker 1: said that one of our our problems is that we
Speaker 1: want to explain alien reduction, and phenomenon is either a
Speaker 1: literal encounter or with aliens, or or some sort of
Speaker 1: a spiritual situation. And he argues that it's something in between,
Speaker 1: or it could be something in between. So I have
Speaker 1: a quote here from him, he says quote. So the
Speaker 1: simple answer would be, yes, it's both. It's both literally
Speaker 1: physically happening to a degree, and it's also some kind
Speaker 1: of a psychological spiritual experience occurring and originating perhaps in
Speaker 1: another dimension. And so the phenomenon stretches us, or it
Speaker 1: asks us to stretch, to open to realities that are
Speaker 1: not simply the literal physical world, but to extend to
Speaker 1: the possibility that there are other unseen realities from which
Speaker 1: our consciousness are, if you will. Learning processes over the
Speaker 1: past several hundred years have closed us off. So I
Speaker 1: think that's uh. I'm surprised this guy doesn't didn't really
Speaker 1: amass a full cult following, like a pure religious following
Speaker 1: based on the way he was navigating like both interpretations here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I told you this before we came to the studio. Actually,
Speaker 1: I read an interesting bio piece about him and then
Speaker 1: other researchers. So both McNally and Clancy, who I've been
Speaker 1: siting throughout these two episodes, were also at Harvard University
Speaker 1: at the same time Mac was. There was conflict between
Speaker 1: their their views about the alien abduction experience. It was
Speaker 1: interesting in that piece they described the alien abductees that
Speaker 1: Mac worked with as being like acolytes to him, like
Speaker 1: though the way that he was dreaming what was happening
Speaker 1: to them was so appealing that it it did almost
Speaker 1: have a kind of cultish quality to it. Yes, Samaris summarizes.
Speaker 1: She says, the main drive of people like Mac, Jacobs,
Speaker 1: and Hopkins is to assure us that these are not
Speaker 1: the delusions of psychotic people, primarily women, but rather the
Speaker 1: true experiences of normal, everyday people suffering great anguish, silence
Speaker 1: and stress about having absolutely no control over repeated violations
Speaker 1: of their psyches and bodies. And I think that's that's
Speaker 1: rather telling you, because you also get down to I
Speaker 1: think the skeptical view here and saying, well, you know,
Speaker 1: what kind of trauma is, what kind of feelings about
Speaker 1: your place in the world are at the heart of
Speaker 1: of these the of you know, false memories and you know,
Speaker 1: fantastic experiences that are reported. I think, let me see
Speaker 1: if I can try to frame this in a way,
Speaker 1: although you know he's passed, so I don't know how
Speaker 1: well I can do this. But it seems to me
Speaker 1: that what mac was trying to do was begin a
Speaker 1: lie and of inquiry into what was going on with
Speaker 1: alien abduction that wasn't immediately hostile in its skepticism, right,
Speaker 1: That wasn't immediately saying you're a liar or you've been
Speaker 1: duped by an evil hypnotherapist, right Like. He was trying
Speaker 1: to unpack it in a way that had sympathy for
Speaker 1: these victims, right, Um, But he wasn't quite all the
Speaker 1: way there to the like the empirical unpacking that McNally
Speaker 1: and clancy got to with sleep paralysis and false memory implantation. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I think also, I mean, just based on that
Speaker 1: quote that I read earlier, you can tell that there
Speaker 1: is a there is a like a spiritual element to
Speaker 1: his interpretation that is just not going to sit well
Speaker 1: with with skeptical audiences. Now, another point that to some
Speaker 1: Mars makes is she says that that then in all
Speaker 1: of these alien induction snares, there are other elements of
Speaker 1: quotes quote progressive social order, racism, homophobia, heterosexual angst, fear
Speaker 1: of white domin, desire by white people to be dominated
Speaker 1: and taken, gender dysphoria. So she and she also argues
Speaker 1: that there's a you know, obviously a lot of sexual
Speaker 1: abuse and a general co opting a feminist sexual abuse
Speaker 1: language by males. He's interesting interesting to end up with
Speaker 1: these the scenarios where a you know, white middle class
Speaker 1: American male in the seventies or eighties is having this
Speaker 1: experience where he's lost control and is sexually violated by
Speaker 1: this outside force. And so you can instantly think to
Speaker 1: a number of different cultural elements that could be they
Speaker 1: could be influencing that, Like is this individual like is
Speaker 1: he afraid of the is there some sort of like
Speaker 1: a deep hidden fear of of like what's going on
Speaker 1: in the in the gay rights movement, cultural change in
Speaker 1: that regard, Just trying to wrap your head around that,
Speaker 1: like wrapping your like if you're I'm again like I'm
Speaker 1: picturing like a real like Madman type character here is
Speaker 1: like very straight laced, kind of by the books suburban,
Speaker 1: straight white man who's in power, right, and like trying
Speaker 1: to wrap your head around gay rights, are trying to
Speaker 1: wrap your head around what was going on with women
Speaker 1: in the seventies when they are coming forward with stories
Speaker 1: about sexual abuse, stuff that you used to be covered up,
Speaker 1: you know. I mean like maybe that's what what part
Speaker 1: of this was, was them trying to understand it by
Speaker 1: by making it about themselves. Yeah, yeah, trying to like
Speaker 1: women's rights being a big issue and and and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, reproductive rights especially, like you can imagine this
Speaker 1: being sort of the weird treatment of that. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's that's one of the the academic reads on Ridley
Speaker 1: Scott's Alien is that you're you're taking a lot of
Speaker 1: like sexual violence and sexual biology for the female and
Speaker 1: transforming it into a horrific male experience. Yeah, I feel
Speaker 1: like there is uh and maybe this is out there
Speaker 1: and we just because there was so much research we
Speaker 1: couldn't tap into it. But there's like definitely a feminist
Speaker 1: read on on this whole phenomenon, right that you could
Speaker 1: kind of take a look at it and see, like
Speaker 1: why is it that like, for instance, like what you
Speaker 1: were saying earlier that like in these stories, women are
Speaker 1: the ones who are self reporting more than men, but
Speaker 1: then subsequently media representations are more about men than they
Speaker 1: are about women. Like there's there's all kinds of things
Speaker 1: that are related to gender with this, which is not
Speaker 1: something I expected to come away with when we dove
Speaker 1: into the research. Yeah, I mean neither. Now. The other
Speaker 1: thing that's interesting here too, is she is hearkening back
Speaker 1: to the study that we briefly mentioned about Baumeister and Newman,
Speaker 1: where they were essentially saying that, Yeah, this whole thing
Speaker 1: is about essentially the victims or masochists and they just
Speaker 1: like want to be dominated. Yes, And you know this
Speaker 1: comes up if we both end up seeing fire in
Speaker 1: the sky. I know this will come into play when
Speaker 1: we look at the at the scene where the aliens
Speaker 1: abduct the individual and perform experiments, because it is it
Speaker 1: is very bondage. Is that essentially that like the the
Speaker 1: individuals like sealed under a vinyl sheet and then they
Speaker 1: still like cut through the sheet in order to probe them.
Speaker 1: But they seem to do a pretty fantastic job of
Speaker 1: drawing upon actual alien abduction related experiences, sort of Nightmarrick
Speaker 1: Cinematic Dream scenarios and also B D s M culture
Speaker 1: like they somehow wrap it all up in a in
Speaker 1: a in a fresh package. I'm looking forward to checking
Speaker 1: it out. I noticed it's on Amazon Prime, so I'm
Speaker 1: gonna try to watch. Uh and and again I haven't
Speaker 1: seen it, but from what I saw in the trailer,
Speaker 1: Communion seems to have a sort of similar vibe to
Speaker 1: it as well. Oh yeah, Communion is a that's that
Speaker 1: is a whole uh, that's a that's a whole kettle
Speaker 1: official into itself with the author Whitley Strieber Um, it
Speaker 1: was like publication. Communion a true story was the name
Speaker 1: of the book, and then was made into a film
Speaker 1: with the Christopher Walkin. I write the trailer looks a
Speaker 1: little ludicrous because of our sort of associations with Christopher
Speaker 1: Walkin now in that voy but it seems menacing. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it came up in some of the research here because
Speaker 1: I know that he was kind of he was kind
Speaker 1: of a divisive figure even within like alien abduction communities.
Speaker 1: There were there was at least one of one of
Speaker 1: the There was one critic in particular I think that
Speaker 1: was was not happy with the like the sexual aspects
Speaker 1: of his uh, his alleged encounters, and they were just
Speaker 1: kind they were kind of ridiculing him within the alien
Speaker 1: abduction community. All right, well, I'm gonna try to do
Speaker 1: my homework before we hit a trailer talk, which would
Speaker 1: be the trailer talk will actually come out probably the
Speaker 1: day after this episode airs, but for you, for all
Speaker 1: of you, I'll have like a good seven days. Now.
Speaker 1: I want to come back around to Mac again, because
Speaker 1: there's this interesting thing that's going on at Harvard University.
Speaker 1: Back in two thousand three, it was ground zero for
Speaker 1: this debate over what was actually going on with alien abduction.
Speaker 1: So you've got John Mac on one side, and Susan
Speaker 1: Clancy and Richard McNally and another, and they're all there.
Speaker 1: Mac argued that the experiences couldn't be understood in the
Speaker 1: Western rationalist tradition of science, while you've got McNally and
Speaker 1: clancy countering, well, actually, Mac, the answer to alien abduction
Speaker 1: is is very simple. And then they outline, you know,
Speaker 1: they say, we don't think the abductees are lying, but
Speaker 1: that Mac himself is just entertaining far fetched ideas in relation. Right,
Speaker 1: He's not really, he doesn't seem like he's really using
Speaker 1: Okham's razor here, right, yeah, yeah, and uh so this
Speaker 1: was actually quite a problem for Harvard University, is so
Speaker 1: to be clear here though, I don't want to malign mac.
Speaker 1: This guy performed hypnotherapy on his patients and published thirteen
Speaker 1: of those encounters in his book Abduction, which I mentioned
Speaker 1: earlier as being very popular. He was a firm believer
Speaker 1: in that practice, and he believed he retrieved his own
Speaker 1: memories of his mother's death, which occurred when he was
Speaker 1: eight months old. So that's how much of a proponent
Speaker 1: he was for hypnotherapy. He was said to prize the
Speaker 1: experiential narrative over empirical data, so you can see where
Speaker 1: scientists would feel like, well, that's definitely drawing a line
Speaker 1: in the sand that we don't want to be on
Speaker 1: that side of. Uh now. So to give you a
Speaker 1: sort of outline of his Harvard experience, he was on
Speaker 1: the faculty there since nineteen fifty five, and then in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty two he founded the Center for Psychology and
Speaker 1: Social Change. There, his work often straddled conventional science and
Speaker 1: altered states of consciousness. Sounds just like our kind of guy.
Speaker 1: When he founded the Department of psychiatry at the Cambridge
Speaker 1: Hospital in nineteen sixty nine. This ended up attracting innovative
Speaker 1: Eastern oriented psychiatrists, and then Mac himself studied the guided
Speaker 1: meditation of Werner Erhard as well as Stanislav Gravs holotropic breathwork,
Speaker 1: which essentially seeks to induce an altered state through rapid breathing.
Speaker 1: And the faculty at Harvard were not thrilled with all this,
Speaker 1: and especially with his alien abduction research, so they actually
Speaker 1: had a committee conduct a fifteen month investigation into his work.
Speaker 1: But at the end of all that there was no
Speaker 1: no formal censure. Essentially, the interviews with like the head
Speaker 1: of the department, he was just like, look, we just
Speaker 1: want him to be empirical about the way he's going
Speaker 1: about this, that's all um. But I don't think they
Speaker 1: could find anything that was like enough for them to
Speaker 1: you know, get rid of him. But to be clear here,
Speaker 1: Mac distanced himself from whether or not aliens were real.
Speaker 1: Every time somebody asked him about that, he said, you know,
Speaker 1: what I'm more interested in is a consensus reality that
Speaker 1: we've created that precludes us from ever entertaining the idea
Speaker 1: of alien abductions, so he's more interested again in the
Speaker 1: sort of cultural reality. So this is kind of fascinating
Speaker 1: this guy, like he was countercultural in his own way,
Speaker 1: but at the same time, he wasn't like fully dipping
Speaker 1: his toe into the alien abduction experience. And then he's got,
Speaker 1: you know, later in his career, he's got these colleagues
Speaker 1: who show up at Harvard and they're like, actually, like,
Speaker 1: we think we've got the answer here. Looks looks pretty straightforward.
Speaker 1: We think it's a sleep paralysis combined with magical thinking,
Speaker 1: combined with false memory implantation. Yeah, and then he's saying, no,
Speaker 1: I'm not quite I'm not quite ready to admit that.
Speaker 1: I think there's this there's this middle ground, and we
Speaker 1: haven't quite explored it. Yeah. I think all of this
Speaker 1: presents an interesting vision though, that that, you know, that
Speaker 1: of people who felt the weight of of a century
Speaker 1: of technological and social change, who then experienced something or
Speaker 1: assume the experience in varying ways that allowed them to
Speaker 1: testify to it physically. You know, it's almost I really
Speaker 1: almost get the sense of of people, and not just
Speaker 1: like scattered individuals, but like large groups of people. In
Speaker 1: the second half of the twentieth century who really felt
Speaker 1: lost and unmoored and just powerless in what was happening,
Speaker 1: and this was this was kind of a way to
Speaker 1: to connect part of them to a to to some
Speaker 1: sort of a guiding force. Yeah. And while I've never
Speaker 1: had any kind of alien abduction experience growing up in
Speaker 1: that period of time, and you know, I'm an adult now,
Speaker 1: I look back and I have sympathy for that, Like
Speaker 1: there's a certain amount of that that makes sense, you know,
Speaker 1: the feeling like there wasn't anything that was really grounding
Speaker 1: me to the community I existed in. Um, let's do
Speaker 1: a quick review of what we came to here, and
Speaker 1: then I think we can close out this two parter. So,
Speaker 1: all right, what do we understand about alien abduction? Scientifically,
Speaker 1: there doesn't appear to be any difference between abductees and
Speaker 1: the general population in terms of their psychopathology and their
Speaker 1: personality type. So we established that. But there do seem
Speaker 1: to be individual factors that can increase the likelihood of
Speaker 1: people developing false memories for alien abduction, And the biggest
Speaker 1: of these is the belief and interest in paranormal phenomenon.
Speaker 1: When you combine that with a susceptibility to hypnotic suggestions.
Speaker 1: Individuals can interpret events like sleep paralysis as alien in
Speaker 1: abduction events, then it's possible for abductees to recover those
Speaker 1: false memories that have been accidentally implanted over the course
Speaker 1: of hypnotherapy. And I think you know from that review
Speaker 1: that I was going over from Finkelstein, the big thing
Speaker 1: to take away from this is further research really seems
Speaker 1: to be needed into the hypnotherapy aspect of it, which
Speaker 1: was John max sort of realm of inquiry, right, like
Speaker 1: he was really into that. But what we need more
Speaker 1: research on is sort of the dynamics of how the
Speaker 1: hypnotherapy is interacting with the human consciousness. Yeah, and of
Speaker 1: course there's so many questions than about suggestibility, and yeah, uh,
Speaker 1: this is definitely one of those episodes where I feel
Speaker 1: like we we kind of end with more questions than
Speaker 1: we began. I mean, I'm still very much in the
Speaker 1: in the category of of saying that I do not
Speaker 1: think that aliens have visited our world, and I do
Speaker 1: not think that the they have abducted people. But that
Speaker 1: doesn't make what's going on any less amazing and interesting
Speaker 1: and and and ultimately like a little mysterious because we
Speaker 1: have to try and piece it all together, both the
Speaker 1: scientific side of it and the cultural side of it.
Speaker 1: And that's that's where I think the really fascinating mysteries
Speaker 1: here are. And this is a phrase that stuff to
Speaker 1: blow your mind. Listeners are probably sick of me making
Speaker 1: on the show, But it seems to me like these
Speaker 1: are canaries in a coal mine, right that, like when
Speaker 1: you've got a subset of the population that is all
Speaker 1: they're coming up with this narrative that's incredibly similar and
Speaker 1: we don't know where it's coming from. Rather than dismiss it,
Speaker 1: look at it and say, what is this saying about us? Like,
Speaker 1: what's what's going on? And but I don't mean that
Speaker 1: this is like a warning bell like oh, aliens are
Speaker 1: real and they're gonna attack or something. That's not what
Speaker 1: I mean, but that there's something going on psychologically that
Speaker 1: we need to understand better about ourselves before we perceive.
Speaker 1: Because the other side of it, too is there were
Speaker 1: not only the individuals that that claim to have these experiences,
Speaker 1: but everybody else was eating it up and it still
Speaker 1: is eating it up, you know. So it's even if
Speaker 1: you're not directly participating in the in the experience, you're
Speaker 1: still engaging in a vicarious experience with it, Like there's
Speaker 1: something about that alien abduction narrative that still speaks to
Speaker 1: to so many denizens of the century. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: I mentioned this to you. But Close Encounters of the
Speaker 1: Third Kind is coming up on its fort anniversary and
Speaker 1: they're rereleasing it in theaters for a week, and my
Speaker 1: wife wants to go see it because she has fond
Speaker 1: memories of that film. And I really thought to myself
Speaker 1: for a second, I was like, I love that movie,
Speaker 1: but is that Is that a movie that like a
Speaker 1: lot of people want to go see in the theater again?
Speaker 1: And clearly it must be if they're going to put
Speaker 1: the effort into that kind of marketing. And it makes
Speaker 1: you think, you know, forty years later, there's still enough interest,
Speaker 1: even in that fictional version of it, that there's got
Speaker 1: to be something going on. There's some kind of bell
Speaker 1: that's ringing deep in the back of our mind. Mhm,
Speaker 1: al right, Well, as do what that bell is and
Speaker 1: why it's ringing. We would we'd love to hear from
Speaker 1: everyone out there, and we we'd specially love to hear
Speaker 1: from you. If you yourself have had a UFO or
Speaker 1: alien abduction experience, and I'd love to just I'd love
Speaker 1: to read what you have to say in terms of
Speaker 1: you know, self analysis of that and dissecting that, like
Speaker 1: what do you think was going on there? Um? You know,
Speaker 1: why did you why did you experience it? And how
Speaker 1: have you how have you dealt with it since then?
Speaker 1: And I really hope that like the way we've presented
Speaker 1: these two episodes on alien abduction have have shown that
Speaker 1: we are sympathetic to this experience, but that we're trying
Speaker 1: to look at it through the lens of the research
Speaker 1: that's been done on it. Yeah. I mean, just because
Speaker 1: I don't think the aliens are real, it doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that I think that the experience is invalid or that
Speaker 1: the experience is not real for a variety of reasons
Speaker 1: that we discussed in these episodes. So if you want
Speaker 1: to get in touch with us about that stuff, here
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Speaker 1: of our blog posts and all of our videos. In fact,
Speaker 1: uh we do have an older episode back when Julia
Speaker 1: was co host about alien abduction too, so it might
Speaker 1: be nice to listen to that and kind of see,
Speaker 1: like over the years, like what the transformation has been
Speaker 1: in in our perspective. Yeah, yeah, and uh hey, and
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