If aliens hadn’t approached people then why did so many people have the same experiences and believe it? This was one of the prominent questions. Sleep paralysis was the explanation for why people felt this lack of control over their bodies. It was a bit strange that so many of the people spoke about their genitals being affected in strange ways. I’m not sure if the paralysis makes their bodies feel this way? Alien abduction is a culturally formed explanation. Whoever started the stereotypical image of the alien affected the minds of many people. One of the men interviewed didn’t seem likely to be interested in the ideas of aliens at all, but because he was aware of what they were they became a resource for a weird experience. Why is it that people turn to alien abduction and not something like closet monsters coming out during the night? Well maybe some people do and it’s just in a different study. I don’t know. Maybe between the two the idea of aliens is more realistic since we can look in a closet and see there are no monsters but can’t see the entire universe. Humans desire to know the reasons behind things. Isn’t any religion a sort of explanation to something that can’t be proven? There isn’t full evidence, but for whatever reason people are susceptible to believing things, but once the mind is set either because of hypnosis or how someone was raised, it’s hard to change the thinking pattern. People can be coaxed into believing all sorts of things and when more and more people start to believe the same thing, it’s easier for people to trust themselves. People who were interviewed who didn’t have the memory for the experience felt something and because they were emotionally affected it seemed real to them. This is another interesting example of how malleable our memories are and how a combination of what we think happened and someone else’s approval affects our confidence.
What struck me most about this reading was that all (or most) of the people who believed that they were abducted by aliens seemed to use supposed memories or beliefs of being abducted as a way to explain things in their life that bothered them. Clancy points this out on pg. 33 when she writes that “Alien-abduction beliefs seem to reflect attempts to explain odd, unusual, and perplexing experiences.” However, it is interesting to me that even when people who claim to be abducted by aliens are given other possible (and more scientifically plausible) explanations for their experiences, such as sleep paralysis, they still believe they were abducted (even if they don’t have memories to support this). I wonder why they would rather believe that they were abducted by aliens (which is a claim that has stigma surrounding it) than believe that their horrifying instances are products of a more conventional explanation. I can propose an answer: I believe that all people (some more than others), and in certain situations, have a tendency to believe that their lives, particularly unusual events in their lives, are extraordinary. Though the possibility that one was abducted by aliens is a horrifying one, it also may be horrifying for one’s extraordinary experience to be reduced to a scientific explanation. I believe that, for many, an extraordinary experience must be explained in an equally extraordinary way. Otherwise, it would seem—understandably so—dissatisfying. The one experiencing such an extraordinary thing may not feel understood if their experience was minimized to the result of a psychological/scientific phenomenon. The widely-known fact that memories are reconstructive was touched on briefly at some point in these three chapters. One of the main principles of this assertion is that one’s memories are constructed in order to fit their present needs of the one remembering. Therefore, I wonder that if one has a present need to make their experiences extraordinary (for whatever reason- whether it is because they are extraordinary to them or they wish for them to be), are they more likely to construct false memories that help to make their experiences feel more extraordinary?
Clancy’s book “Abducted” is an enjoyable, engaging read, and a very interesting case study in the research on false memory. Clancy makes the topic interesting (not that it isn’t incredibly interesting by its own merit) by involving her own personal story as well as anecdotes and descriptions of the people she encountered in her studies. What is probably most interesting about abduction research to me, after all my research on implanting false memories, is that it violates the first and most important rule of forming false memories: it must be plausible. Alien abduction certainly seems to strain plausibility, and yet not for the people who encounter these memories/beliefs. What makes it plausible to them, as Clancy explains, is this interesting intersection of culture/media influence and unexplained phenomenon. Ultimately it makes complete sense- if one can’t explain something that has happened to them, especially something so terrifying as the effects of sleep paralysis, they will use culturally entrenched ideas to fill in the gaps. It just so happens that alien abductions fit the ‘symptoms’ of sleep paralysis, and this makes it an easy target for those who long for an explanation. In my findings as well, plausibility in creating false memories has dealt a great deal with authority. If, as Clancy states, the ‘abductee’ follows their initial belief and seeks outside help from a hypnotist, abduction researcher, therapist, etc. who uses some form of guided imagery to produce memories, this authority is also likely to contribute to the creation of memories. This cultural and phenomenological intersection is something I find very interesting as it truly shows how much culture, mass media, and other forms of collective knowledge guide our beliefs and actions. One must ask- do our beliefs create culture or does culture create our beliefs? That is, how would this situation be different if sleep paralysis WAS a well-known phenomenon? As Clancy explains in the final chapter, phantom limb disorder differs from the beliefs of the abductees because it IS a well known disorder, and thus people who have unexplained feelings or convictions do have an explanation to hold onto, without having to resort to the mass media, or relying on anecdotal evidence that relay similar experiences or information. It truly is a fascinating concept, and Clancy does a great job at deconstructing the traditional stereotypes of the ‘wierdos’ who think they have been abducted by aliens.
Susan Clancy’s Abducted is an eye-opening exploration into the study of false and “repressed” memories, specifically those involving alien abductions. Beginning with the controversial study of repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, Clancy found herself at the spearhead of a psychology and political war. After publishing a study in which she claimed that certain subjects whom she interviewed were susceptible to developing false memories, both her subjects and advocates for the war against childhood sexual abuse were outraged, either because they interpreted her findings as disbelief in their accounts of abuse or because Clancy’s findings were misconstrued as supporting pedophilia. Still highly interested in repressed and false memories, but distraught over the fact that she felt she had made her subjects lives worse by asking them to confide in her and then publishing a study which claimed they probably never endured such abuse, Clancy turned her attention to alien abductions, a far less controversial and painful subject in which she could pursue her study of false memories. Clancy explains that people become to believe they were abducted through an “attribution process” (2005: 33). After experiencing something bizarre or unusual, such as delusions during sleep paralysis or feeling generally depressed or like an outsider looking in on life, many people search for an explanation to their odd feeling or experience as it is a “cultural preoccupation” (Clancy 2005: 36) in the United States to find a cause for one thing or another. There are countless therapists, psychiatrists, scientists, and spiritualists constantly bombarding society with explanations for everything and offering to help anyone seeking answers for their unusual feelings or experiences find one. But with so many reasonable and practical explanations, especially in the area of sleep paralysis and experiencing delusions of “shadowy figures,” why would anyone choose to accept the least plausible explanation of alien abduction? Clancy explains that while the concept of extraterrestrial life and abductions seems implausible to most, it has been widely publicized in books, movies and on television and is more readily available as an explanation to waking up paralyzed with “aliens” surrounding you than the less known about but highly researched fact of sleep paralysis. More so, the physical and emotional pain and fear felt during sleep paralysis, combined with the fact that individuals are conscious but unable to move or speak, render the experience wholly real. Whereas others might look at the experience and offer the explanation of sleep paralysis, the individuals who experienced the terror know and feel that the experience, or abduction, occurred and don’t care if others believe them. While Clancy attempts to allay the stigma of crazy associated with those claiming to have been abducted by aliens by asserting that most people, if not everyone, has one odd belief or another without any solid evidence to support it, the examples she provides are far less drastic than believing in extraterrestrial abduction. Swimming in the freezing Long Island Sound may or may not be good for your health, and working 120 hours a week has both its pros and cons, but both are founded in something real and plausible. Despite the fact that I agree that this universe is too large to just be home to everyone and everything on earth, the concept of aliens is completely unfounded, implausible and has been refuted by countless scientists, researches and astronomers as nothing more than something out of a science fiction movie. While Clancy’s statement that “they (abductees) believe what they believe not because of any objective evidence, but in spite of it. They didn’t question their experiences. They were trying to confirm their beliefs” (2005: 28) is intriguing, it does nothing to further their cause. While I am all for opening my mind to new ideas and experiences and respecting the opinions of others, the idea of life on another planet has no basis at all. When searching for an answer as to why one might feel this way or another and there are so many societally recognized, credible explanations, it appears to me that those who choose the most unlikely and doubtful explanations may just be looking for attention, or are possibly a little crazy.
Now I’m starting to believe in aliens and alien abductions. I really enjoy Clancy’s explanations and style of writing because it’s a very interesting issue (one that we normally wouldn’t think to read about in a psychology class) and she breaks this topic down so that the audience takes a different perspective-not viewing these accounts as abnormal and impossible, but shedding light on the psychological nature of human beings. At first I didn’t take this seriously. Really? You’re going to study people who have reported being abducted by aliens? There’s no evidence in this work and who would believe you? But then Clancy was clever enough to answer her audience’s next question all the time making this week’s reading a good thriller while being informative. My initial thoughts started with the idea that maybe the people Clancy worked with were dreaming? Dreaming is still a huge mystery in science, but proves to have a function of consolidating data acquired during the day along with imagining, having nightmares, etc. Could they consciously be dreaming? Does that exist, conscious dreaming? Are they delusional? Maybe they were just really convincing in their narratives, but as Clancy explains the events that had been retold to her by her subjects were incredibly confident, but could not be explained. I searched and found that conscious dreaming (or lucid dreaming) was a good guess, but most of the accounts we’ve been presented with seem to be asleep during the time of abduction and couldn’t actively participate in the dream. How about delusional? This could be part of the answer, but these events seemed so real to the subjects and like Clancy mentioned they were all very “normal” people who interacted well with others. So why would they create such a confabulated story? Not just a small group, but lots of people. It might be true. As I was reading I had the same question about hypnosis and its role in their testimonies. How does hypnosis prove to be a reliable way to bring out descriptions of aliens that their experiences with them? Well, it doesn’t because they often can create false memories that seem real. They might even distort and alter the experience and memory, but if being hypnotized forces us to reconstruct our memories each time, we can see patterns of what might appear often as convincing and what isn’t. As proven, we create false memories all the time and are convinced of something so easily as long as it’s repeatedly cued. Hypnosis also gets memories out verbally because without it, many of these testimonies wouldn’t have been explained. With that said, is hypnosis the only strategy? For now, I think it’s a great tool to bring memories out on the table because people already have difficult time explaining their experience but whether it’s accurate or not is the question. What really is true?
When reading about how Clancy met up with Robert and his friends, I could not help but link that to a Christian non-believer going to a Christian community meeting or any religion for that matter. This is because all these people she interviewed had their own views and beliefs about meeting these aliens and the symptoms they had from their encounters. They could also give an image of the aliens. However, their encounters were not backed up by any evidence apart from physical or mental injuries such as bruises and epilepsy. When I first went to church, I was overwhelmed by testimonies and stories the believers had to share. They talked about what God had done to their lives and how their lives had changed. Some even talked about encountering God or Jesus or angels. I had many questions and my questions were always turned away. I was told that there was no need to prove everything and that as long as I was a believer, anything was possible. Also, when encountering these aliens, I question why it only happens at night. These aliens are like ghosts and spirits whom people encounter mostly at night and when they get that heavy feeling on top of them and they cannot scream.Apart from that, I also question why many of them encounter pains in their private parts or that they remember the aliens doing sexual experiments on them. Is that why this alien abduction issue is linked to childhood sexual abuse? Furthermore, why do people link their trauma and depression with their encounter with aliens if they cannot remember any bad childhood memories? This topic is very interesting as it is an eye opener to me. Before this, I never knew that people took aliens seriously. Secondly, this topic leaves many questions. How did the issue of aliens come about? How do people know what aliens look like? When describing what they saw, they usually describe those that look like the movies. Is it because they are influenced by the images in the movies that they create a false memory of what they actually encountered?
First things first, WHO are these therapists and why are they still in business? I simply do not see how the practice of retrieving and implanting memories is possibly ethical, or legal; especially with regards to the ones to whom other therapists refer their patients because they “deal with this stuff”. Clancy notes the wrongly founded belief that hypnosis is a “psychological truth serum” (p.59). This is appalling to me when there is no concrete evidence about repression to still instigate in session (hypnosis, regression therapy, guided imagery-with the SAME intention!). Mind-blowing. She mentions that the patient should be wary of going into these sessions with a pre-conceived notion of what they are looking for. It is too easy to fill in the blanks. Clancy’s own tale of hypnosis was rather frightening. Through the fits of laughter I had myself while reading this book, I sobered up quickly when she explains her own creation of a false memory. I am simply stunned at the ease with which people are manipulitable. I would almost want to try it myself to disprove this to myself. I simply cannot imagine ‘not having memories’ of an event and creating a narrative around this to such a seriously detrimental extent. Between satanic rituals and alien abductions, I find it increasingly difficult that people are unable to accept logical, scientific explanations for their sufferings (such as plain and simple chemical imbalances, overload of serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine, or even sleep paralysis). It would appear as if people were afraid of having too logical an explanation and gravitate, as Clancy accurately deduces, towards something with which they are simply more familiar. There also seemed to be a concurrent theme of depression, depressive-like symptoms or loneliness in these cases “I’ve been depressed since as long as I can remember” (p.34) “he’d suffered brain damage…and become severely depressed” (p. 26) “I was alone watching David Letterman” (p.27) etc. It is true what Clancy states that “we’re unaware of the prevalence of…anxiety disorders, perceptual aberrations, chemical imbalances…psychosomatic pain” (p.38) but it appears that even this with knowledge, the comfort of having a social support, the idea of having your beliefs justified by case after case of common reports without any apparent clinical explanation (at least, that is the idea) is reassuring. Clancy’s theory of our “cultural preoccupation” (p.36) with trying to understand ourselves, with looking for something bigger, more important, more substantial with questions like “why me?”, is interesting. It is only natural to question emotion (fear, anger, depression) it is only, as she repeatedly states, the particular choice of explanation which sends eyebrows rising. I can’t deny that walking to the bathroom to brush my teeth alone tonight went without some serious heightened cerebral activity (what if….?). It certainly is alluring, and indeed it is the determination, or convinced affect with which a patient tells his unconceivable story which helps pinpoint psychosis. I am thus surprised that there have been no connections between psychopathology and alien abduction reports as of late. Maybe to come.
Aliens are treated as if they don’t deserve the same amount of speculation that scientists give to any other subject. The idea of a human being sharing an experience or being abducted by an alien is debatable. The evidence that seems so hard to find or non-existent is for good reason. If there actually were aliens who come down to earth and abduct people then the government and the aliens themselves would have a lot of motivation to keep it a secret. The government as a whole is too general a term. Not everyone working for the government would be privy to this top-secret information. If the people who claim to have been abducted by aliens are mistaken or even lying their choice to tell that story says something about them as individuals. Some of the reports of alien abductions could easily be describing a rape or sexual molestation occurring when not fully conscious. It could be easier to frame the traumatic incident in a way that protects the abuser. The article on Satan in Washington state seemed to be a prime example of how a traumatic incident can take on a life of its own and become a fictional exaggeration even if it is rooted in reality. The idea that scientists may one day be able to erase human memories to me is much stranger than the idea of alien abductions. Everyone defines aliens differently. Sometimes aliens are overlapped with certain religions. Why do the majority of people in our country and possibly others completely discount the existence of aliens? Could it be that we are all being brainwashed? In this case maybe it is possible to erase a human being’s memory. Maybe men in black the movie was a subversive political film posing as a comedy…
8 comments:
Abducted
If aliens hadn’t approached people then why did so many people have the same experiences and believe it? This was one of the prominent questions. Sleep paralysis was the explanation for why people felt this lack of control over their bodies. It was a bit strange that so many of the people spoke about their genitals being affected in strange ways. I’m not sure if the paralysis makes their bodies feel this way? Alien abduction is a culturally formed explanation. Whoever started the stereotypical image of the alien affected the minds of many people. One of the men interviewed didn’t seem likely to be interested in the ideas of aliens at all, but because he was aware of what they were they became a resource for a weird experience. Why is it that people turn to alien abduction and not something like closet monsters coming out during the night? Well maybe some people do and it’s just in a different study. I don’t know. Maybe between the two the idea of aliens is more realistic since we can look in a closet and see there are no monsters but can’t see the entire universe. Humans desire to know the reasons behind things. Isn’t any religion a sort of explanation to something that can’t be proven? There isn’t full evidence, but for whatever reason people are susceptible to believing things, but once the mind is set either because of hypnosis or how someone was raised, it’s hard to change the thinking pattern. People can be coaxed into believing all sorts of things and when more and more people start to believe the same thing, it’s easier for people to trust themselves. People who were interviewed who didn’t have the memory for the experience felt something and because they were emotionally affected it seemed real to them. This is another interesting example of how malleable our memories are and how a combination of what we think happened and someone else’s approval affects our confidence.
What struck me most about this reading was that all (or most) of the people who believed that they were abducted by aliens seemed to use supposed memories or beliefs of being abducted as a way to explain things in their life that bothered them. Clancy points this out on pg. 33 when she writes that “Alien-abduction beliefs seem to reflect attempts to explain odd, unusual, and perplexing experiences.” However, it is interesting to me that even when people who claim to be abducted by aliens are given other possible (and more scientifically plausible) explanations for their experiences, such as sleep paralysis, they still believe they were abducted (even if they don’t have memories to support this). I wonder why they would rather believe that they were abducted by aliens (which is a claim that has stigma surrounding it) than believe that their horrifying instances are products of a more conventional explanation. I can propose an answer: I believe that all people (some more than others), and in certain situations, have a tendency to believe that their lives, particularly unusual events in their lives, are extraordinary. Though the possibility that one was abducted by aliens is a horrifying one, it also may be horrifying for one’s extraordinary experience to be reduced to a scientific explanation. I believe that, for many, an extraordinary experience must be explained in an equally extraordinary way. Otherwise, it would seem—understandably so—dissatisfying. The one experiencing such an extraordinary thing may not feel understood if their experience was minimized to the result of a psychological/scientific phenomenon. The widely-known fact that memories are reconstructive was touched on briefly at some point in these three chapters. One of the main principles of this assertion is that one’s memories are constructed in order to fit their present needs of the one remembering. Therefore, I wonder that if one has a present need to make their experiences extraordinary (for whatever reason- whether it is because they are extraordinary to them or they wish for them to be), are they more likely to construct false memories that help to make their experiences feel more extraordinary?
Clancy’s book “Abducted” is an enjoyable, engaging read, and a very interesting case study in the research on false memory. Clancy makes the topic interesting (not that it isn’t incredibly interesting by its own merit) by involving her own personal story as well as anecdotes and descriptions of the people she encountered in her studies.
What is probably most interesting about abduction research to me, after all my research on implanting false memories, is that it violates the first and most important rule of forming false memories: it must be plausible. Alien abduction certainly seems to strain plausibility, and yet not for the people who encounter these memories/beliefs. What makes it plausible to them, as Clancy explains, is this interesting intersection of culture/media influence and unexplained phenomenon. Ultimately it makes complete sense- if one can’t explain something that has happened to them, especially something so terrifying as the effects of sleep paralysis, they will use culturally entrenched ideas to fill in the gaps. It just so happens that alien abductions fit the ‘symptoms’ of sleep paralysis, and this makes it an easy target for those who long for an explanation. In my findings as well, plausibility in creating false memories has dealt a great deal with authority. If, as Clancy states, the ‘abductee’ follows their initial belief and seeks outside help from a hypnotist, abduction researcher, therapist, etc. who uses some form of guided imagery to produce memories, this authority is also likely to contribute to the creation of memories. This cultural and phenomenological intersection is something I find very interesting as it truly shows how much culture, mass media, and other forms of collective knowledge guide our beliefs and actions. One must ask- do our beliefs create culture or does culture create our beliefs? That is, how would this situation be different if sleep paralysis WAS a well-known phenomenon? As Clancy explains in the final chapter, phantom limb disorder differs from the beliefs of the abductees because it IS a well known disorder, and thus people who have unexplained feelings or convictions do have an explanation to hold onto, without having to resort to the mass media, or relying on anecdotal evidence that relay similar experiences or information. It truly is a fascinating concept, and Clancy does a great job at deconstructing the traditional stereotypes of the ‘wierdos’ who think they have been abducted by aliens.
Susan Clancy’s Abducted is an eye-opening exploration into the study of false and “repressed” memories, specifically those involving alien abductions. Beginning with the controversial study of repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, Clancy found herself at the spearhead of a psychology and political war. After publishing a study in which she claimed that certain subjects whom she interviewed were susceptible to developing false memories, both her subjects and advocates for the war against childhood sexual abuse were outraged, either because they interpreted her findings as disbelief in their accounts of abuse or because Clancy’s findings were misconstrued as supporting pedophilia. Still highly interested in repressed and false memories, but distraught over the fact that she felt she had made her subjects lives worse by asking them to confide in her and then publishing a study which claimed they probably never endured such abuse, Clancy turned her attention to alien abductions, a far less controversial and painful subject in which she could pursue her study of false memories.
Clancy explains that people become to believe they were abducted through an “attribution process” (2005: 33). After experiencing something bizarre or unusual, such as delusions during sleep paralysis or feeling generally depressed or like an outsider looking in on life, many people search for an explanation to their odd feeling or experience as it is a “cultural preoccupation” (Clancy 2005: 36) in the United States to find a cause for one thing or another. There are countless therapists, psychiatrists, scientists, and spiritualists constantly bombarding society with explanations for everything and offering to help anyone seeking answers for their unusual feelings or experiences find one. But with so many reasonable and practical explanations, especially in the area of sleep paralysis and experiencing delusions of “shadowy figures,” why would anyone choose to accept the least plausible explanation of alien abduction? Clancy explains that while the concept of extraterrestrial life and abductions seems implausible to most, it has been widely publicized in books, movies and on television and is more readily available as an explanation to waking up paralyzed with “aliens” surrounding you than the less known about but highly researched fact of sleep paralysis. More so, the physical and emotional pain and fear felt during sleep paralysis, combined with the fact that individuals are conscious but unable to move or speak, render the experience wholly real. Whereas others might look at the experience and offer the explanation of sleep paralysis, the individuals who experienced the terror know and feel that the experience, or abduction, occurred and don’t care if others believe them.
While Clancy attempts to allay the stigma of crazy associated with those claiming to have been abducted by aliens by asserting that most people, if not everyone, has one odd belief or another without any solid evidence to support it, the examples she provides are far less drastic than believing in extraterrestrial abduction. Swimming in the freezing Long Island Sound may or may not be good for your health, and working 120 hours a week has both its pros and cons, but both are founded in something real and plausible. Despite the fact that I agree that this universe is too large to just be home to everyone and everything on earth, the concept of aliens is completely unfounded, implausible and has been refuted by countless scientists, researches and astronomers as nothing more than something out of a science fiction movie. While Clancy’s statement that “they (abductees) believe what they believe not because of any objective evidence, but in spite of it. They didn’t question their experiences. They were trying to confirm their beliefs” (2005: 28) is intriguing, it does nothing to further their cause. While I am all for opening my mind to new ideas and experiences and respecting the opinions of others, the idea of life on another planet has no basis at all. When searching for an answer as to why one might feel this way or another and there are so many societally recognized, credible explanations, it appears to me that those who choose the most unlikely and doubtful explanations may just be looking for attention, or are possibly a little crazy.
Now I’m starting to believe in aliens and alien abductions. I really enjoy Clancy’s explanations and style of writing because it’s a very interesting issue (one that we normally wouldn’t think to read about in a psychology class) and she breaks this topic down so that the audience takes a different perspective-not viewing these accounts as abnormal and impossible, but shedding light on the psychological nature of human beings.
At first I didn’t take this seriously. Really? You’re going to study people who have reported being abducted by aliens? There’s no evidence in this work and who would believe you? But then Clancy was clever enough to answer her audience’s next question all the time making this week’s reading a good thriller while being informative. My initial thoughts started with the idea that maybe the people Clancy worked with were dreaming? Dreaming is still a huge mystery in science, but proves to have a function of consolidating data acquired during the day along with imagining, having nightmares, etc. Could they consciously be dreaming? Does that exist, conscious dreaming? Are they delusional? Maybe they were just really convincing in their narratives, but as Clancy explains the events that had been retold to her by her subjects were incredibly confident, but could not be explained. I searched and found that conscious dreaming (or lucid dreaming) was a good guess, but most of the accounts we’ve been presented with seem to be asleep during the time of abduction and couldn’t actively participate in the dream. How about delusional? This could be part of the answer, but these events seemed so real to the subjects and like Clancy mentioned they were all very “normal” people who interacted well with others. So why would they create such a confabulated story? Not just a small group, but lots of people. It might be true.
As I was reading I had the same question about hypnosis and its role in their testimonies. How does hypnosis prove to be a reliable way to bring out descriptions of aliens that their experiences with them? Well, it doesn’t because they often can create false memories that seem real. They might even distort and alter the experience and memory, but if being hypnotized forces us to reconstruct our memories each time, we can see patterns of what might appear often as convincing and what isn’t. As proven, we create false memories all the time and are convinced of something so easily as long as it’s repeatedly cued. Hypnosis also gets memories out verbally because without it, many of these testimonies wouldn’t have been explained. With that said, is hypnosis the only strategy? For now, I think it’s a great tool to bring memories out on the table because people already have difficult time explaining their experience but whether it’s accurate or not is the question. What really is true?
When reading about how Clancy met up with Robert and his friends, I could not help but link that to a Christian non-believer going to a Christian community meeting or any religion for that matter. This is because all these people she interviewed had their own views and beliefs about meeting these aliens and the symptoms they had from their encounters. They could also give an image of the aliens. However, their encounters were not backed up by any evidence apart from physical or mental injuries such as bruises and epilepsy. When I first went to church, I was overwhelmed by testimonies and stories the believers had to share. They talked about what God had done to their lives and how their lives had changed. Some even talked about encountering God or Jesus or angels. I had many questions and my questions were always turned away. I was told that there was no need to prove everything and that as long as I was a believer, anything was possible.
Also, when encountering these aliens, I question why it only happens at night. These aliens are like ghosts and spirits whom people encounter mostly at night and when they get that heavy feeling on top of them and they cannot scream.Apart from that, I also question why many of them encounter pains in their private parts or that they remember the aliens doing sexual experiments on them. Is that why this alien abduction issue is linked to childhood sexual abuse?
Furthermore, why do people link their trauma and depression with their encounter with aliens if they cannot remember any bad childhood memories?
This topic is very interesting as it is an eye opener to me. Before this, I never knew that people took aliens seriously. Secondly, this topic leaves many questions. How did the issue of aliens come about? How do people know what aliens look like? When describing what they saw, they usually describe those that look like the movies. Is it because they are influenced by the images in the movies that they create a false memory of what they actually encountered?
First things first, WHO are these therapists and why are they still in business? I simply do not see how the practice of retrieving and implanting memories is possibly ethical, or legal; especially with regards to the ones to whom other therapists refer their patients because they “deal with this stuff”. Clancy notes the wrongly founded belief that hypnosis is a “psychological truth serum” (p.59). This is appalling to me when there is no concrete evidence about repression to still instigate in session (hypnosis, regression therapy, guided imagery-with the SAME intention!). Mind-blowing.
She mentions that the patient should be wary of going into these sessions with a pre-conceived notion of what they are looking for. It is too easy to fill in the blanks. Clancy’s own tale of hypnosis was rather frightening. Through the fits of laughter I had myself while reading this book, I sobered up quickly when she explains her own creation of a false memory. I am simply stunned at the ease with which people are manipulitable. I would almost want to try it myself to disprove this to myself. I simply cannot imagine ‘not having memories’ of an event and creating a narrative around this to such a seriously detrimental extent. Between satanic rituals and alien abductions, I find it increasingly difficult that people are unable to accept logical, scientific explanations for their sufferings (such as plain and simple chemical imbalances, overload of serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine, or even sleep paralysis). It would appear as if people were afraid of having too logical an explanation and gravitate, as Clancy accurately deduces, towards something with which they are simply more familiar.
There also seemed to be a concurrent theme of depression, depressive-like symptoms or loneliness in these cases “I’ve been depressed since as long as I can remember” (p.34) “he’d suffered brain damage…and become severely depressed” (p. 26) “I was alone watching David Letterman” (p.27) etc. It is true what Clancy states that “we’re unaware of the prevalence of…anxiety disorders, perceptual aberrations, chemical imbalances…psychosomatic pain” (p.38) but it appears that even this with knowledge, the comfort of having a social support, the idea of having your beliefs justified by case after case of common reports without any apparent clinical explanation (at least, that is the idea) is reassuring. Clancy’s theory of our “cultural preoccupation” (p.36) with trying to understand ourselves, with looking for something bigger, more important, more substantial with questions like “why me?”, is interesting. It is only natural to question emotion (fear, anger, depression) it is only, as she repeatedly states, the particular choice of explanation which sends eyebrows rising. I can’t deny that walking to the bathroom to brush my teeth alone tonight went without some serious heightened cerebral activity (what if….?). It certainly is alluring, and indeed it is the determination, or convinced affect with which a patient tells his unconceivable story which helps pinpoint psychosis. I am thus surprised that there have been no connections between psychopathology and alien abduction reports as of late. Maybe to come.
Aliens are treated as if they don’t deserve the same amount of speculation that scientists give to any other subject. The idea of a human being sharing an experience or being abducted by an alien is debatable. The evidence that seems so hard to find or non-existent is for good reason. If there actually were aliens who come down to earth and abduct people then the government and the aliens themselves would have a lot of motivation to keep it a secret. The government as a whole is too general a term. Not everyone working for the government would be privy to this top-secret information. If the people who claim to have been abducted by aliens are mistaken or even lying their choice to tell that story says something about them as individuals. Some of the reports of alien abductions could easily be describing a rape or sexual molestation occurring when not fully conscious. It could be easier to frame the traumatic incident in a way that protects the abuser. The article on Satan in Washington state seemed to be a prime example of how a traumatic incident can take on a life of its own and become a fictional exaggeration even if it is rooted in reality. The idea that scientists may one day be able to erase human memories to me is much stranger than the idea of alien abductions. Everyone defines aliens differently. Sometimes aliens are overlapped with certain religions. Why do the majority of people in our country and possibly others completely discount the existence of aliens? Could it be that we are all being brainwashed? In this case maybe it is possible to erase a human being’s memory. Maybe men in black the movie was a subversive political film posing as a comedy…
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