From a scientific viewpoint, I would say that how much "basis for existence" anything has is dependent on the empirical evidence in support of it and/or its consistence with other known/proven facts. Since these claims satisfy neither of these criteria as far as I can tell, I'm not sure how they could be said to have "as much basis for existence as many things that are set concretely in our way of life." So your statement makes no sense to me whatsoever.
Assume you’re an Australian aborigine who lives out in the back of beyond in the Outback and has never seen a white man (can’t be blamed, considering how bad the white man has treated them over the years) and has no intention of going near any place where western technology and society resides. Totally dependant upon the resources and knowledge of his own people and nothing else. What would the wisest aborigine make of a Pentium 4 processor? There is no way that aborigine could possibly guess how it works or test it, even if he understood English and had read a high school textbook about basic computing.
If I had managed to get hold of whatever it was that had been lodged inside my sinal cavity (and assuming that I’m correct in my assumption that it was an implant) and could give it to you and you could send it to Cal Tech or M.I.T. or any other specialist establishment that contained the very cutting edge in scientific instruments and minds… so what? If the technology was unrecognizable and not based even loosely on anything we understand as technology or even theoretical science, what would you have? Nothing is what. You would have an artifact that had been placed inside a human by a species that appears to be significantly more advanced, but you couldn’t empirically prove that it was anything besides the molecules it was made out of. You could put it in a moist environment at a precise 98.6 degrees and see it mutate, sprout wings, dance the Fandango and sing a chorus from the Bollero, but it would prove nothing other than we don’t know what it is.
What you are asking for, the proverbial “smoking gun”, doesn’t exist because I don’t think it can. If you make a bald statement such as “There is no definitive 100% proof of alien abduction” then I would agree with you. Evidence as we understand cannot exist in the way you (and I) wish it to. In defence of my side of the turf though, while there are obviously publicity seeking charlatans and “investigators” who couldn’t investigate their own toilet bowl, there is better stuff out there and there are unanswered questions. More on this further down…
There is to my knowledge at east one piece of evidence removed from one abductee that disappointed on removal because it looked like a shard of glass. It wasn’t however, as it proved conducive to electricity and its structure when studied under an electron microscope was different to glass. Assume it’s a genuine implant, what does it prove? Nothing! It only poses more questions because we can’t explain it.
And therein lies my biggest point to the totally objective and impartially skeptical mind: this case is not open and shut. Unlike what you say below there are great gaping hole in a lot of classic “debunkings” and their case if far from watertight.
Well, of course because he could discover nothing "organically" wrong doesn't mean there couldn't have been some such thing but merely something undiscovered, by him personally, or possibly something as yet unknown to science and medicine in general. And of course because he couldn't pigeon-hole them, as you put it, doesn't prove that they weren't "disturbed" in some way. It's also possible that they were perfectly sane and yet had false memories and/or were simply lying. I don't know why any sort of illness, mental or otherwise, organic or inorganic, would be prerequisite to either of those possibilities. Perfectly sane and healthy people lie and imagine things, probably for a great number of different reasons.
If something had been organically wrong, then it would, probably, have taken medical intervention to put right. As it turned out it just took me getting the opportunity to talk to certain people who helped me assimilate the trauma into my life. I haven’t suffered from depression or PTSD for years now, yet my abductions continue.
That's a pretty big "if". What primarily detracts from his credibility, in my opinion, is what would appear to be either his extreme naivety and/or his arrogance, whichever the case may have been, in considering himself such an infallible judge of human character as to feel qualified in basing his opinion of the "reality" of these patients' claims apparently solely on his own subjective judgment, simply because he couldn't, as you've put it, "pigeon-hole" them as having a "condition" predisposing them to lying or fantasizing. Or to put it differently, whether they were intentionally lying or merely fantasizing, or both, it was, in my opinion, either highly naive or highly arrogant of him to believe himself incapable of being "fooled" by them. There are many human motivations which can't be easily "pigeon-holed" and which don't necessarily involve any sort of illness, "organic" or otherwise. But it seems fairly clear that, in the lack either of corroborating evidence or a high degree of plausibility, the literal truth of these patients' "stories" was probably the least likely correct interpretation of them.
The medical profession does tend toward arrogance. I imagine I would if my occupation had a basic training period of five years.
Human motivations: Do you discount evidence of the consistency of accounts before they became fashionable in the media?
But he may have been additionally hampered in working partially outside his field, in feeling himself remotely qualified to judge the scientific plausibility of their claims, just as Targ an PutHoff (not sure if I correctly recall the spelling of the latter) were bamboozled in their testing of the supposed psychic abilities of magician Uri Geller, through a combination of working in a relatively unexplored field, particularly in an area completely outside their own fields, their naivety in dealing with human subjects, and in the presence of what was probably a strong bias on their own part, in their overzealousness to believe in the very abilities they were purportedly objectively researching to determine the existence of. Similarly, despite his credentials, Mack himself may have been highly fantasy-prone, thus making him as gullible as Targ and Puthoff were in their "testing" of Geller. That is, he wasn't extremely well-educated in the area of astrophysics, for example, as far as I know. This of course, assuming that it wasn't a blatantly intentional fraud on his part throughout.
Who would you consider a person remotely qualified to judge the scientific plausibility of their claims?
If so, again it wasn't recently enough to have clear recollection of it at the moment. But it's certainly consistent with what I know of the mythology surrounding the topic of supposedly repressed and recovered memory. I've read enough of the recent research in the area of memory to know that human memory isn't highly reliable in a general sense, never mind recovery of a supposedly "lost" or "repressed" memory with precision. And I personally have enough experience in the area of hypnosis to appreciate the folly of trusting memories supposedly recovered in that fashion, as I understand a number of these cases have been based on, although as far as I can recall you didn't specifically say that was true in your case.
This is beginning to sound like a sub-plot to The Matrix.
Hypnosis I regard as an uncertain thing. I started recovering memories consciously from the age of 12 and continue to do so eighteen years later. I have been hypnotized once for the purposes of regression to an abduction incident. It was an unusual experience to say the least and the recall was different to any memories I previously had. Unlike the ones recovered myself there was a haziness surrounding the whole thing and a feeling of being half unconscious inside the memory. The ones that have come back to me consciously stand as loud and clear as any other memory.
Hypnosis is, I am certain, neither a smoking gun nor infallible. It is useful for therapeutic purposes however.
But knowing the extreme fallibility/unreliability of human memory in general, as well as our fantasy-prone nature (with some of us perhaps even more so than others), certainly "influenced" memory has a much higher degree of plausibility than do claims of alien abduction. From a scientific perspective it's by far the more plausible explanation; that is, it's something we know occurs, as compared with something which is pure conjecture with no real evidence in support of it whatsoever that I know of. And I don't consider "wild" stories "evidence" of a phenomenon (other than as evidence of the well-known phenomenon of human fantasy, that is) If I did, I might consider fairies, leprechauns, and unicorns plausible as well. In fact, personally I'm not sure these fictional creatures aren't somewhat more plausible than claims of alien abduction, since it's generally acknowledged that there are likely as-yet undiscovered life forms on this planet, while "visitations" by any sort of sophisticated extraterrestrial life, with or without "intelligence", has no evidence in support of it whatsoever that I know of.
No perhaps about it, any human trait will be more prominent in some people than others. Abductees I would posit with some certainty are above the average for imaginativeness, which does not presuppose that they hallucinate or delude themselves.
Can you explain more about “influenced memory”?
I knew you were being at least partially sarcastic, but I tried to answer your question the best I could anyway, just in case there was a serious question behind it.
There was a serious question, which I’ve enlarged above with my own thoughts on comparing sciences from radically different peoples. Nothing to do with photography though.
"Almost" an outright liar? Is that something like "almost pregnant? If one was to "almost lie" in court, could they be charged with "almost perjury", I wonder?
It doesn’t take much more than a grain of intelligence to understand what I meant Cab. You understand me perfectly I’m sure. Lawyers, politicians and tabloid journalists specialize in “bending the truth” for a living. Phillip Klass does exactly the same thing. That is what I mean. More below…
In fact, this sounds very typical, I might say stereotypical, of the sort of general ad hominem attack skeptics are frequently subject to when their careful investigations expose gaping holes in the claims of fraudulent psychics and others making "fantastic" claims.
You’re generalizing. There is nothing stereotypical about my criticism of Klass, only the underhand methods he uses.
For instance: As one of Klass’s favourite debunkings seems to have been Travis Walton (more about him later as you mention him again), let’s got for one of his remarks that poke criticism at his case, using a quote from Walton’s account of the incident. I’m not quoting directly from Klass’s exerpt of Walton’s book as I haven’t read it for years and don’t own a copy. I do have a better than average memory however, so this will be 99% accurate.
Searching my memory I seem to remember there were six other people with Travis Walton the night of his incident. Some time later one of the group spoke to, I think, Mike Rodgers, the foreman of their lumberjacking gang that night and said he’d been offered $10,000 by a newspaper to deny the thing had ever taken place. Rodgers asked the guy if he was going to take the money even though he knew he’d be lying, and he replied that he didn’t know but was thinking about it.
“Then you’ll spend the money alone. And you’ll be bruised” replied Rodgers.
When Klass wrote about this in his own book, he phrased it somewhat differently. It went something like this…
“Rodgers asked X if he was going to take the money and he said he didn’t know, but was thinking about it… “Then you’ll spend the money alone and you’ll be bruised” replied Rodgers.
Walton, in my opinion, is rightly pissed about this in his book released just after the god-awful FITS film. What many writers use as a convenience (three periods indicating a gap in the conversation) Klass has used to change the entire context of the sentence. The remark about knowing it’s not true is now gone and Rodgers even sounds like he’s threatening the former colleague with physical violence if he breaks’s the group’s story.. Klass did this sort of thing all the time and probably never more so than in Walton’s case. The bullshit he talks about the polygraph tests taken by Walton is truly mind-bending.
And In fact, I seem to recall that magician James Randi was met with a lawsuit as a consequence of his exposure of Uri Geller some years ago. While I don't suppose it's likely he had a case with a leg to stand on in any court of reason, unfortunately it's well-known that the filing of even "frivolous" lawsuits is all too easy in our litigious society, and such suits can be time-consuming and expensive to defend oneself against, even if they're ultimately without merit. So perhaps it was Randi's experience with Geller, possibly among other cases, which led Klass to use some caution, with regard to your reference to "the most legally allowable misrepresentation [sic]".
I was saying that Klass bent the truth to the maximum it could be without breaking. I don’t think he’s used any caution whatsoever.
But you might seem to be being somewhat cautious yourself in not citing a specific example of this alleged "misrepresentation". Again, that's fairly typical of the kind of general, nonspecific personal attacks skeptics face, since, in knowing they generally don't stand a chance of defending themselves effectively against the skeptics' specific revelations, the best these pretenders can usually do is attack the skeptic personally and attempt to discredit him by impugning his motives, etc. Unless you have a particular specific example of this alleged misrepresentation, such as I was at least willing to offer above in the case of John Mack, for example, even if you may not have liked my source for whatever reasons of your own.
Again, you’re assuming and generalizing. I’ve just mentioned two counts above, one specifically. I’d have to go out and get copies of various books from libraries and eBay if you want anything more specific.
Travis Walton? Where have I heard that name? Would he be the one about whom it has been said: Police were a little annoyed that they only learned of Travis' return through the mass media several days later: Neither Duane nor Mike had informed them. Still suspecting either foul play or a criminal hoax, police checked out the phone booth story. They found that the phone company did confirm the Neff home had received a call from the phone booth around midnight, but that none of the fingerprints on the phone were Travis Walton's. They found other problems too. While other people were out searching for Travis, Duane and Mike spent most of their time giving interviews to UFO investigators. Among the taped interviews that the investigators shared with the police were two interesting stories. Mike stated that he was delinquent on his forest service contract, and said he hoped Travis' disappearance would alleviate the situation. Duane said that he and Travis were lifelong UFO buffs, that they frequently saw them, and that they had recently discussed what to do if one of them were ever abducted.
For a complete and utter destruction of just about anything said against the Walton case (and I don’t think the rebuttals used have holes in them) try reading Walton’s autobiography. That’s all I can say.
http://www.amazon.com/Fire-Sky-Walt...bs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209924714&sr=1-2
There is, to my knowledge, not a single criticism or accusation of hoax laid against the case that Walton doesn’t answer convincingly. It won’t convince you that it physically happened because the only evidence is the eyewitness testimony of seven people and a Polygraph examiner. No chunks of spacecraft, no flakes of DNA from a silicon based lifeform and no postcard from Alpha Centauri… but what it does do is deal with everything against it and pretty much blows gaping shreds in every counter theory apart from group hallucination.
And...
Some 18 years later Travis' book was made into a movie called Fire in the Sky, which was greatly fictionalized because the studio felt Travis' own account wasn't deemed interesting enough. As part of the publicity for the movie, the studio arranged for Cy Gilson — the polygraph examiner who had originally passed Mike Rogers and the crew — to test Travis, Mike, and one of the crew again. Not surprisingly, they all passed with flying colors. But then a new face appeared on the scene, whose identity has never been known but whom Klass called simply X. Mr. X telephoned Travis and claimed to be a military intelligence operative who happened to be hunting nearby on that day in 1975. The studio had Cy Gilson test Mr. X. The only report of Mr. X's polygraph results come from the most recent edition of Travis' book, wherein he claims that Mr. X was found to be truthful about what he had seen that day, but that he was lying about being a military intelligence operative. Travis opined that Mr. X may have been hired by Phillip Klass to gain popular credibility and then publicly announce that the whole thing was a hoax, a baseless charge denied by Klass. Another possibility is that Mr. X was simply some kook looking for publicity.
So that's about the size of it. What does a skeptical analysis of the Travis Walton episode tell us? Jerome Clark, the UFO editor, has said "After more than two decades, Walton's credibility survives intact. No shred of evidence yet brought forth against it withstands skeptical scrutiny." Well, this would be true, except that there simply isn't any evidence either way. Instead, there is a gaping lack of evidence. There were no injuries to Travis' shoulder from his violent throw in the blue light beam, there were no disturbances to the pine needles on the forest floor where it all happened, and the medical exams revealed nothing to indicate any trauma or malnutrition from his missing five days. Travis and his crew have had to rely only on polygraph tests, and then only on the cherrypicked positive results, ignoring the negative results. There is just as much polygraph evidence against the Walton case as there is supporting it. This self-contradictory nature is the reason why polygraph evidence is not legally admissible in court: Speaking strictly scientifically, it doesn't tell us anything.
The few bits and pieces of physical, testable evidence that Travis' story would have produced, if true, were never present. To summarize, there is, and never has been, any proof that anything ever happened. The far more plausible explanation, that of a youthful moneymaking or attention-getting scheme by a couple of UFO enthusiasts, has worked out well. To critically analyze a far-out, incredible story like an extraterrestrial abduction, the first request we make is to show us any evidence. And, at this first hurdle, the Travis Walton story has failed completely.
Given your sarcasm and irony laden intro I assumed both paragraphs would be daming indictments of the credibility of Walton and his case. The first is inaccurate and the second just states that it can’t be proved one way or the other.
This quote is correct in saying that there is no physical proof of Walton’s abduction. And? That isn’t the issue. The issue is that the criticisms and accusations of bullshit are provably false.
It does mention the group cherrypicking the polygraph results however. Ahhhh… this is going to be fun.
The first polygraph performed on Travis Walton is the one people cite as having been proof that he was lying. It is discountable for two big reasons: 1/ Walton was (from the point of view of having suffered a real abduction) still in a traumatized state and any examiner worth his salt wouldn’t have conducted it. Polygraph tests key off non-intetntional physiological responses such as heightened heart rate, greater perspiration or increased respiration. The theory goes that when asked a question, in the moment before answering with a lie the testee feels a flicker of fear about being discovered that he can’t stop from giving those fluctuations. If the testee is in a state of emotional turmoil, the test is pointless as he or she will continually give false positive signals. Secondly, it was done unprofessionally and in an unendorsed way by the person conducting it. No, I’m not going to go into why, because I can’t accurately remember the details. If you can be bothered and if you care, get off your ass and actually read Walton’s account without skipping pages. He gives a far better account of it than I can and as that article you cite so gleefully says quite clearly, Walton’s integrity is completely intact. The only problem is the lack of the alien monkey wrench to prove he was on board a ship.
I also notice that it could be implied from the paragraph you cite that there may be more than one negative result of a polygraph in this case. It is of course ambiguous, as one could say “The results of this single test are…” I’m just clarifying for the sake of clearness.
Of the other tests done to the group, five passed and the one who didn’t was a neutral; the result was indecisive. The reason for this was that the guy walked out part way through because he thought (wrongly) that the examiner was trying to set him up for Walton’s murder. According to Cy Gilson, the Arizona polygraph examiner, he had answered truthfully up to the point of leaving however. Unfortunately the fact that he walked out negated the results of his test.
In the following years Walton took two more polygraph tests and Rodgers one more. All three tests indicated they were being truthful, like the initial ones of the other four men in the gang. I believe the man who walked out
may have since taken a second tests which he sat all the way through and passed. That may be my memory playing tricks on me, but I think it did happen. The rest I’m certain about.
So you have one test that would be discounted in a court of law because it wasn’t properly conducted and the subject was not in a suitable condition to be examined, one inconclusive that would probably have been a pass if the guy had stayed to the end, and eight/nine passes. Using the laws of logic that you revere so much, what do you think that indicates? It proves nothing of course, but a false negative, an inconclusive and eight or nine positives tells me, if polygraph technology can be relied on, that the seven men were telling what they believed was the truth. That doesn’t rule out all seven simultaneously having an identical hallucination of course.
Another little piece of Klass truth bending to snapping point… he states that Walton was allowed to help choose his own questions for the test he passed and cites this as a reason for needing to discount it. Correct, he did help choose his own questions. You know why? Because that is standard procedure for legally binding polygraph tests. Klass brings it out of the closet like another piece of condemnation but he’s either a blatant conman pretending to be a skeptic or he’s just ignorant of the procedure.
To learn more, such as why the police were skeptical of the story right from the start, Waltons's "shady" dealings with the National Enquire, etc., further sordid details may be found
here. As far as I know this author hasn't yet been sued by anyone for anything he's said about Walton or the case, but if you feel you have reason to doubt something in this account, it might help if you could be somewhat specific as to exactly which statements you may feel you have reason to doubt or disagree with, rather than merely impugning the authors ethics or motives, as you've done above with Klass (no pun intended).
Sued? In a case as public as this one was (probably the most public one of all time) you really think Walton has the time, money or inclination to sue every fuckwit who’s ever stated an opinion based on false assumptions? How can you sue someone for being wrong anyway? You can sue someone for misrepresentation or for publicly accusing you of being a pedophile when you aren’t, but how can you sue someone for being ignorant? And how can you sue every person you regard as being ignorant who’s ever put finger to keyboard?
Ah, this would be about the initial polygraph? Strange to find someone as logic-minded as yourself citing the National Enquirer. Kind of like George Bush trying to form an alliance with Jesse Jackson.
I have dealt with the initial test above however and don’t feel the need to repeat myself. I do however think you should, if you have anything approaching an open mind, read Walton’s account of it. There is nothing mentioned in that article that Walton does not address in the FITS autobiography. You’ve already said that you haven’t read a complete book about abduction. Well, this may be a good time to start. I’m not saying read and believe, gods no. I’m saying read this one in particular because it does a wonderful job of rebutting utterly the man whom those in the skeptical corner love to venerate.
Actually, I think your question is a bit overly convoluted. It might be much simpler to just say that I've never seen a case that had any compelling corroborating evidence in support of it, period. Nor have I seen you offer a single such example here thus far. And until such a case is presented, whether by you or anyone else, I have no more reason to assume any such case exists than I have to believe in fairies or unicorns.
Me? Convoluted? Never.
😀
Ah, so you’re not saying there are flaws in the cases presented then, just that they’re not conclusive enough to account as being totally proved? Funny that, because you come across as a die-hard skeptic. You say you’re open-minded, but you cite people like Klass, who is as shady a character as exists on the skeptic side. That doesn’t strike me as someone who is open to changing their mind. I would criticize his methods as much or more than you do John Mack’s.
Here’s the kicker though, after many paragraphs trawling through your responses and typing my thoughts on them, I agree with you in this last paragraph. There is not a piece of single evidence that can prove this phenomenon exists. No piece of ship, no gray’s nail clippings, no chip taken from an abductee’s body with a tm stamp on it that protects the rights of Blarg, resident of Epsilon Eridani. What do exist however, are hordes of unanswered questions and evidence in favour that whilst not conclusive proof of the reality of abduction, is most definitely not discreditable. And some of the attacks on cases by critics like the aforementioned Klass have, as I’ve said to the point of tedium, no basis in truth and with much the same flavor as your average tabloid article because of his persistent misrepresentation of the facts.
