Skeptics, Debunkers and the Facts at Hand

Excerpted from Walking Among Us

© 2015 By David M. Jacobs, Ph.D.

 

Scientists, debunkers, and skeptics have many reasons to ignore or discount the abduction phenomenon. No one disputes that people claim to have been abducted. Thus, the phenomenon is either psychological or experiential – there are no other options. Because the experiential explanation is, for many, too unlikely to consider, debunkers and skeptics put forth myriad psychological explanations for it. They cite faulty hypnosis, false-memory syndrome, sleep paralysis, popular-culture osmosis, sexual abuse in childhood, fears of the new millennium, hysterical contagion, self-hypnosis, the will to believe, myth and folklore, and many more explanations.

I have read over thirty-five different – and, for the most part, mutually exclusive – debunking explanations to account for abduction narratives. All the debunkers have a common mind-set. They do not know the accurate evidence for the phenomenon; they ignore the evidence they do know; they distort the evidence to conform to their explanations. I have found no exceptions to this. Most skeptics fail to realize that competent abduction researchers are also familiar with psychological explanations and have thoroughly examined them. No serious researcher wants to mistake psychological accounts for experiential ones. For debunkers, however, any explanation – no matter how divorced from the evidence, no matter how outlandish is preferable to the idea that abductions are real.

The abduction phenomenon does not lend itself to facile answers. Here are some aspects of reported abductions that must be accounted for in any explanation:

• When people are abducted, they are physically missing from their normal environment.

• People are sometimes abducted in groups and can confirm each others’ reports.

• Bystanders sometimes see people being abducted.

• When returned to their normal environment after an abduction, people often have marks, cuts, bruises, broken bones, and even fully formed scars (a biological impossibility) that were not there before the abduction.

• When returned, people sometimes have their clothes on inside out or backward, or they are wearing someone else’s clothes. In these cases, they clearly remember dressing themselves correctly beforehand.

• Most of what abductees describe has no antecedents in popular culture.

• The abduction phenomenon cuts across all social, political, religious, educational, intellectual, economic, racial, ethnic, and geographic lines.

• The abduction phenomenon is global. People describe the same things in the same detail worldwide, regardless of cultural differences.

• Abductions occur at all times of the day and night, depending on access to the abductees and when they will be least missed. Abductees need not be sleeping.

• Abductions begin in childhood and continue with varying frequency into old age.

• The abduction phenomenon is intergenerational. The children of abductees often themselves report being abductees, as do their children.

• Abductions are unrelated to alcohol or drugs.

 

Of equal importance is how abductees deal with the phenomenon.

 

• Most abductees fear abductions and want them to stop. They do not revel in them.

• High-functioning people who report these experiences testify against their own interests, knowing that public disclosure could ruin their careers.

• Many abductees have “screen memories” that recall vivid, irrelevant events that mask abduction activity

• Some abductees accurately remember large parts or all of their abductions without hypnosis.

• People remember what happened to them in greater precision, detail, accuracy, and completeness with competent questioning.

• Abductions are sometimes investigated a few weeks, days, or hours after they happened, minimizing memory degradation.

• Abductees often have long-standing cherished memories of seeing deceased relatives or religious figures. When they investigate their memories, they realize that they are of the abduction phenomenon and not what the abductees had desperately wanted them to be.

 

There has never been anything like this in human history...

– David M. Jacobs, Ph.D. from Walking Among Us © 2015 – All Rights Reserved

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