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Alien Abductions: Reports, Theories & Stories (Not IHTM)

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Tarzan responsible for Alien Abduction memories?

This isn't quite so fanciful as it sounds, but I've come up with this theory.

In the mid 70's there was a cartoon version of Tarzan broadcast on the BBC - Cheetah wasn't in it but he was friends with a spider monkey or similar. In one episode he came across an alien space ship which was abducting jungle animals.
Could this have inserted a deep fear of abduction into the minds of very small children which are now being recovered as memories under hypnosis?
 
To be honest, it seems unlikely that one episode of a fairly obscure cartoon would have had such drastic effects. If things worked like that, wouldn't we expect far more aliens to resemble you and your fellows, as the Daleks were phenomenally succesful in imprinting themselves on small minds (I bet there are grown ups who still hide behind the sofa at the sight of one!!).
 
It wasn't me, officer... I'm human, I tell you, human!!!

"me jane"

(sorry)
 
OK, maybe pointing specifically at this one episode is a bit much, but what about all the other stuff out there in the media, this must have an effect. I know we explicitly stop swearing, etc on kids TV but does anybody control the content to the point where supressed memories could be placed? I think not.
 
Your basic idea, that media influences the nature of 'abduction' experiences etc., is perfectly sound. There's actually been a bit of research done on SF films and pulp cover art etc which seems to have shaped UFO percipients' narratives. I haven't checked what's there, but the Magonia site would be a good place to start if you're interested, as a lot of the stuff was published in their zine.

Nowadays I think its a given that almost all UFO experiences will be contaminated by preconceptions drawn from the media, as there can be few people on the planet who haven't been exposed to the archetypal flying saucer and grey as images.
 
Red Dalek has a point here. We are inundated with images of aliens from a fairly young age. If you throw in a couple of "waking dreams" you have the recipe for an abduction experience.
 
As wintermute rightly says, this is simply part of a cycle that has been going on for as long as there has been science-fiction. Nowadays the 'loop' is becoming tighter between the fiction and the reported 'real' experiences. The 'real' reports take imagery from the fiction and the fiction sources some of it's imagery from the catalogue of 'true encounters'... and so on... almost to point where the balance is reversed - where (less imaginative)fiction takes it's cues from what has become the generic image of alien abduction. An image that has been slowly carved and refined over many years of this 'fiction <> real report' loop.

I can remember a Scooby Doo episode with similar imagery. Who knows? With a bit of obsessive research, you could probably tie up the Tarzan episode very closely with an existing reported abduction report, but the archetype existed way before that and has been going on in an ever-decreasing loop ever since.

For more on this read Hilary Evans' 'Abducted by an Archetype' from FT 33.
 
Of course, abductions were going on long before space aliens were thought of, but then it was the fairies doing the abducting.:eek!!!!:
 
Quite right, p. younger, and although I don't have any material to support it, I can easily imagine a similar system being in place way back then.
 
I can easily imagine a similar system being in place way back then.

To some extent that's probably true, in that anyone experiencing whatever causes a belief in being abducted by entities would have assumed that fairies were behind it because that was the cultural template. However, I think that the existence of the mediasphere in contemporary culture has meant a qualitative change. The middle ages didn't see thousands of people claiming to have been abducted by fairies, nor is it a pervasive theme in the arts etc. The only pre C18th example I can think of is 'Midsummer Night's Dream' (but I stand to be corrected).

Fairy abductions seem to have been rare, and I'd suspect came from some genuine external cause. Today's abduction narratives seem to be 90% internally generated. That that generation often takes place in collusion with 'UFOlogists' using dubious psychological techniques also marks a difference from the generation of 'fairy tales'.

There is perhaps a parallel between 'recovered' abduction memories and the narratives produced by victims of the witch craze in Europe to their interrogators, but that's another story.
 
August Verango said:
Quite right, p. younger, and although I don't have any material to support it, I can easily imagine a similar system being in place way back then.
Can't remember which issue but probably 5-6 years ago if not more. There was an issue of FT in which goblins were depicted in a drawing/etching/whatever abducting people and taking them underground. They were the spitting image of modern greys.
Hope this jogs someone's memory.
 
"If you want a classier explanation, I'd say you saw a semiotic ghost. All those contactee stories, for instance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi imagery that permeates our culture. I could buy aliens, but not aliens that look like Fifties' comic art. They're semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like the Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing."

William Gibson - The Gernsback Continuum
 
Abductions

I had a strange dream the other evening. I dreamt that there was someone in my home watching me while I was sleeping and then when I woke up, it took five minutes before I realised it was just a dream and I should stop creeping around in the nude trying to find the intruder.

Not a nice image for anyone let alone a prowler. But it got me thinking about the whole abduction theory and how people believe that there is a presence in their homes.

I do not for one minute believe that my dream was anything more than that, but most abduction stories start with the abductee talking about having a dream that someone was in the room with them. Then, during regression hypnosis, they recount events of someone being in the room. Is this real or is the subject just recounting the events of the dream.

Regression hypnosis is just allowing access to memories that have been buried in the mind. Like most people, I sometimes have very vivid dreams which I am able to remember for about two hours (only very rare dreams can I still remember to this day). So, I think it is safe to assume that the brain will then store this dream in memory. If this memory is accessed under hypnosis, how is it possible to distinguish what is a real memory or a dream memory?

I have no doubt that some abduction accounts are real in some way or another (with implants not fitting into my dream theory), but I believe that a large number are simply dreams that are accessed and then believed to be real events.

Am I right? Probably not, but I thought it might be an interesting topic to bring up.
 
I had an incredibly detailed dream when I was 16 of being first hunted ( this happened a couple of times ) and then found and abducted by a UFO . it was truly weird but then and now I have always thought it was a dream . I wouldn't trust hypnotism , your brain can make you believe anything or see or hear anything and I know it can make you remember things that didn't happen too .
 
I have no doubt that some abduction accounts are real in some way or another (with implants not fitting into my dream theory), but I believe that a large number are simply dreams that are accessed and then believed to be real events.

Why, especially following your experience (which I agree is very relevant to how abduction narratives are generated), do you believe that there is any objective reality to abductions? You refer to implants, but nobody has ever produced one that's stood up to even the most rudimentary independent analysis. There are few, if any, credible third party eye-witness accounts of abductions, which, as you rightly say, have a pronounced tendency towards 'happening' to people in bed at night. However, we do have witness accounts of people being observed in trance states at a time when they later claim to have been abducted.

Regression hypnosis is just allowing access to memories that have been buried in the mind

Hypnosis may help recover memories, but it would also appear that its likely to generate quite a lot of fantasy material, and that this material is likely to be influenced by the belief system of the hypnotist. Serious UFOlogists have lone been calling for an end to the use of hypnosis, as it is at the very least, seriously flawed.

Whats particularly relevant and interesting about your experience is how it the dream bled over into reality during a short period after you awoke. This poorly understood and researched phenomena would seem to be of great importance in many areas of Forteana. For example, the 'presence' could as easily be a 'ghost' as an 'alien'.
 
Alien abduction can be good for you, says anthropologist

As posted in Ananova

Alien abduction can be good for you, says anthropologist

A Canadian academic says alien abduction can be a pleasant experience.

Anthropologist Krista Henriksen says her study of people who claim to have been abducted suggests that aliens are quite affable.

Ms Henriksen told the The Edmonton News : "They tell people they're not alone, that they're special, they're chosen for a purpose."

She has studied the accounts of 60 men and women who claimed to have had close encounters.

Most of them remembered being told there were profound, terrible problems with the world but that they had been chosen to do something about it.

"Sometimes they have malevolent messages, manipulative, nasty messages. But that was, by far, the minority," she told the paper. "Most often extraterrestrials were bringing messages of goodwill."

Henriksen recently earned her master's degree in anthropology from British Columbia's Simon Fraser University with the study, Alien Encounters: A close analysis of personal accounts of extraterrestrial experiences.

Although she is "highly sceptical" that aliens have ever abducted anyone, she says it's important to study the phenomenon.

It's easy to dismiss fringe groups like those who believe they've been abducted, she says, but studying them gives us a better understanding of who we are.

Chris Rutkowski, research co-ordinator of Ufology Research of Manitoba, said there were 375 reports of UFO sightings in Canada in 2001.

Story filed: 14:15 Monday 30th September 2002
 
So the new forms of ET are saying pretty much the same as those the contactees encountered in the '50s.
 
"I am not alone. I am special. I am chosen for a purpose. I am
not alone. I am special . . . But next time, fellas, could you warm
the probe, please!" :eek:
 
religion?

Looks like a religion for the space age to me.
The shaman was choosen by the spirits, gods, now its the aliens.
sakina
 
So, are we all off to stand on remote hilltops with sets of disco lights?
 
Bump! Some earlier abduction threads merged here.

And here's another look at one of the more intriguing stories, the Charles Hickson case.
Link is dead. No archived version found. For more on this incident see:

The Pascagoula (Mississippi) Abduction (Hickson & Parker; 1973)
https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...sissippi-abduction-hickson-parker-1973.63158/


This is a very long article, but to summarise:

CH and a younger man, Calvin Parker, were fishing off a pier just after sunset on Oct. 11, 1973 when a UFO appeared (which had also been reported by other witnesses in the area). They were abducted by robots of some sort, and taken into the UFO, where they were examined by a floating eye.

After they were released they told their story to the local law, who were sceptical, and left the men alone with a hidden tape recorder. But the recording just confirmed that they had had a very strange and frightening experience.

CP was severely disturbed by the event, and refused to talk about it ever since, but CH wrote a 1983 book on it, UFO: Contact at Pascagoula which is being reissued this month (hence the news story). CH has also had follow-up experiences, and claims to have an implant in his head.
 
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Harvard Study of Abductions
Link is dead. The MIA webpage can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/2002121...harvard.edu/gazette/2002/10.31/09-clancy.html


A longish article, it deals in false memory study, but as it started from a skeptical viewpoint its conclusion was similarly sceptical about the reality of abductions. Good science? Well it got published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology! :rolleyes:
That gap in Clancy's research on survivors of childhood sexual abuse led her into the world of people who believe they were abducted by aliens. Comfortable in her assumption that their experiences were false, she could test whether people who create false memories in the "real world" are also likely to create false memories in the lab.

But finding subjects and recruiting them for her study was more challenging - and sometimes humorous - than she could have imagined.

"Three years ago, I was so naïve. I just thought I'd put ads in newspapers asking 'have you been abducted by aliens?'" she said.

She received hundreds of calls in response to her ads, but few of them qualified as research subjects. Out of every 10 calls, she said, only two were from people who believed they had been abducted by space aliens.

The other eight were from media seeking a good story, from citizens concerned that Harvard was wasting money on bogus research, from people playing jokes on friends, and even from aliens - or people portraying aliens - themselves. A few calls, she said, were from native Spanish speakers who misunderstood the ad to be looking for illegal aliens who had been abducted at the border by immigration officials.

Convincing the "legitimate" alien abductees to participate in the study was an enormous challenge, said Clancy.

"They're very skeptical about what science is going to say about their beliefs," she said.
.....
And assuming, as Clancy and her colleagues did, that none of the subjects were actually abducted by space aliens, she drew the conclusion that people who develop false memories in the lab are also more likely to develop false memories of experiences that were suggested or imagined.
Sleep paralysis is also invoked as a cause of abduction memories.
 
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Look here for my dream about a UFO abduction experience which ties in nicely with some of the other stuff people have put on here.
Link is obsolete. Here's the current link:
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/extremely-unusual-dream-experiences.5550/post-133601


I had a mild interest in Ufology from about 10 to 23, so I can see where my cultural references in my experience came from.
In recent years I've taken to reading quite a lot of stuff around the phenomenon and delved a lot deeper but as yet haven't had a dream to display the level of knowledge I've gained in the field.
Perhaps over-exposure leads to your mind being unwilling to elaborate, hence a lot of abduction experiences are undertaken by people who have some awareness of the phenomenon, but not a great deal.

ie-I'd read the Unexplained as a child but the Dyfed Enigma articles didn't stick in my mind too much, but were bubbling in my subconcious before appearing in a very vivid dream. Add to that the basic knowledge I had of "alien abductions" and hey presto - I dream I'm abducted and whisked off to an alien base in a rock!
 
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FT 165 has an article on p. 49 by Erys Andys, describing a UFO encounter she had in 1975. The story also involves aliens and an abduction of an Air Force sergeant in New Mexico during a major UFO flap.

It's unusual for FT to publish first hand accounts of this sort of thing - most articles are reports of what others wrote or said - so I found this story quite refreshingly direct.
 
grey alien desilu

As far as TV shows influencing abduction stories go,
the familiar alien that appeared at the end of the very first series of Star Trek (with the baffling words "A Desilu Production")
seems very similar to the aliens that started to appear in abduction stories at that time.
I have seen the opinion expressed that this iconic image entered the collective unconscience and influenced the appartions known as Greys
or was it the other way around...
steve b
 
IIRC, the two abductees from the Pascagoula case were hypnotised again in the '80s/90s. And guess what? This time round they remembered greys, instead of the rather odd entities they previously recalled.
 
Re: grey alien desilu

Eburacum45 said:
As far as TV shows influencing abduction stories go,
the familiar alien that appeared at the end of the very first series of Star Trek (with the baffling words "A Desilu Production")...

"Desilu" was the name of the production company formed by Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, both of "I Love Lucy" fame in the 50s. Not sure if our friends across the pond are aware, but "I Love Lucy" was wildly popular.

Ahem. Carry on.
 
Re: Re: grey alien desilu

Originally posted by Minor Drag
"I Love Lucy" was wildly popular.
It used to be shown here too, but the young 'uns won't remember that! So it never occured to me that someone might find Desilu 'baffling'!
 
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