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February 14, 2016 — Whitley Strieber

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Is we don't know such an untenable intolerable place for you both ?
Is any explanation even if its opinion dressed as the answer , better than no answers yet ?

I think something is happening, cases like the Gosford one with multiple people of good repute reporting the same thing supports that.
I don't know what it is, im not so insecure that not knowing is an issue.
You've decided your opinions are the answers, good for you.

But it exibits the characteristics of classic denialism

It is the automatic gainsaying of a claim regardless of the evidence for it – sometimes even in the teeth of evidence. Denialism is typically driven by ideology or religious belief, where the commitment to the belief takes precedence over the evidence. Belief comes first, reasons for belief follow, and those reasons are winnowed to ensure that the belief survives intact


You "believe" its Humans, nothing is going to change your minds, even though ive illustrated the logical fallacy of some of your claims for "compelling proof"

Your commitment to that belief takes precedence over the logic

There is nothing that prevents an ET from using a device that operates on the same principles as devices we use. The claim that's compelling evidence it CANT be ET is ridiculous .
 
We are limited to deciding about an ET Alien Abduction on a case by case basis. If we can eliminate an infamous and/or famous case for Human caused errors, such as hypnosis and repetitive regression to recover original memories, then the case is invalidated. The Betty and Barney Hill case is dependent on such "memory errors" so that it can not be relied upon to reveal the truth. In fact, the methods that were used can be relied upon to produce false memories and to destroy or alter the original memories too.

You need to present another ET Alien Abduction case that did not use hypnosis or repetitive regression to uncover "the truth". Strieber and the Hills are disqualified to find and reveal the truth about their hypnosis and repetitive regression memories.

The next case is ?
 
You need to present another ET Alien Abduction case that did not use hypnosis or repetitive regression to uncover "the truth". Strieber and the Hills are disqualified to find and reveal the truth about their hypnosis and repetitive regression memories.

The next case is ?
Pascagoula.
 
I have always had a hard time taking Strieber seriously. For one thing, I know how much I modify things when I write down my own strange experiences in order to make them understandable and fit a narrative. The end result is always far from the raw experience. I've heard Strieber often on the Art Bell stream and he always comes across as someone who either can't or won't distinguish his felt reality from an external reality that involves other people. If I didn't know how hard the consequences of that attitude can be, I would just laugh at its comic aspect. Wait, no, I laugh at it anyway.
 
You need to present another ET Alien Abduction case that did not use hypnosis or repetitive regression

Why ?

Hypnosis does not in and of itself invalidate the information in every single case

When terrorists bombed a bus in Israel in 1973 the driver could remember nothing that could help Police. Under Hypnosis he was able to describe individuals that boarded the bus. this led to further clues which led to arrests.
26 children were abducted in chowchilla in 1976. the driver escaped and under hypnosis was able to recall the license plate of the abductors leading to an arrest.
From mid 1975 till 78 a total of 348 hypnogogic regressions were conducted by LAPD leading to 79.3% items of additional information. And while such information is not admissible as evidence. Forensic hypnosis done by a credentialed professional is according to the link below a valuable tool for law enforcement in its battle with crime

Use of hypnosis in criminology: discussion paper.

So the suggestion Hypnosis is worthless is invalid. Its not evidence, but neither does its use automatically disqualify a case as you claim
 
You need to present another ET Alien Abduction case that did not use hypnosis or repetitive regression to uncover "the truth

Soon she began to remember details of that night, and without any outside aid such as regressive hypnosis, or counseling. She recalled the object they had seen in a slightly different place than she first remembered.
What sets Kelly’s experience apart from the multitude of other abduction cases is that here, there are two important elements; independent witnesses to the event and physical trace evidence of some kind of craft.

Kelly Cahill Alien Abduction



witnessed by others? The case of Kelly Cahill


This or any other example wont sway the denialists, you have your answers anything outside that belief will be dismissed. Just don't expect to present your opinions as fact and expect a pat on the back and round of applause for having "solved" the mystery.
 
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Second Family Abducted:

Her great fear and dread would cause her to scream at the alien-looking entities to leave them alone. She remembered going unconscious, and then... she was back in their car. As strange as this encounter seems, it was not without corroboration. The occupants in the other car would come forward and tell almost an exact story, a story of abduction, mind control, and embarrassing medical procedures.



1993-Kelly Cahill Alien Abduction
 
And again if we look at your methodology honeypot, you are not looking at the witness accounts and forming a hypothesis, you are doing the reverse
You've formed a hypothesis and now you must massage and cherry pick the accounts to fit that. When you cant you must dismiss or ignore them.

Its not a good methodology

207.jpg
 
I can disqualify the Betty and Barney case for numerous reasons that I learned enough to know I personally would never trust it as being genuine. Just listen to the first hypnosis tape with Barney, can be found for free on youtube, and the incident could easily be caused by Humans. But, that is only the beginning of my reasoning.

I can not take an absolutist position you seem to want to frame me within that it was impossible ET did it, but within reasonable very long odds, out to several decimal places, IMO, I'm certain Humans could and most likely did this far beyond a reasonable doubt. It's a mystery to know how or why, but that is the opinion I hold. It is infinitesimally too small a possibility that ET did it.

The legal cases you cite have a major flaw. There is no cultural mythology that the media has saturated and supported to pre-define such unique crimes with a common cultural set of beliefs and outcomes vs what the UFO Abduction stories have had in common within our media and UFO community to expose people to such repetitive ET Abduction experiences, beliefs, and similar accounts. The ET Abduction story is already well known awaiting its next victim. Also, there are plenty of innocent people convicted of the most serious crimes known to man that were convicted mainly relying on one or more memories. Some famous cases relied on hypnosis too, and/or multiple witnesses, so there is a seriously flawed error rate when memory is relied upon for the truth.
 
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IMO, Mike is creating a set of arguments that are based in a position of belief and then disguising it as remaining open to not-knowing, i.e., a liminal position. But it is not really a liminal position because he is dogmatic about it (hence sees dogma and denial everywhere he looks, like Whitley)! I find it useful, if frustrating, to watch him inundate the thread with vapid arguments almost devoid of actual data and then pile on supposed methodologies required to participate in the argument. He seems to have taken a leaf out of the disinformationalist's handbook, dissemble, obfuscate, and add as much as noise as possible to drown out the signal. (Sorry to talk about you like you're not here Mike, just wishful thinking! ;))

What is more productive, IMO, is to scrutinize the information of any particular case and find the inconsistencies, failures of logic, and hidden or de-emphasized elements which suggest an alternate reading to the "super natural" (or ET) one. At the risk of tooting my own horn, I have now spent seven years doing this with Strieber's body of work (not counting almost twenty before that, drinking his Kosmic Kool-Aid), and assembled my findings into some sort of coherent order. At this point, whatever Mike and the self-proclaimed agnostics may say, I have proven to myself beyond reasonable doubt:

a) that Strieber is lying about certain things and concealing others;
b) that he is or has been in the past affiliated with groups and agencies with a history of mind control;
c) that his own memory and ability to determine what is real is seriously in question;
d) that his experiences are at least partially orchestrated and shaped by human agencies, as part of a larger agenda.

Mike can say this is opinion posing as fact, but then he would have to look over the evidence I've amassed to know this, and he clearly has no intention of doing so. Even then, I doubt anyone so heavily invested in their beliefs would be able to discern evidence from opinion. But anyway; of course none of this proves that ETs or other nonhuman presences are not involved, much less that they do not exist; but as Mike, with his doctorate in logic, knows, it is impossible to prove a negative so only a fool or a sophist would try.

I extended a friendly challenge for him to show that all the evidence and claims of so-called alien abductees (specifically Strieber) cannot be explained without resorting to a nonhuman element; this was ignored in favor of amorphous but dogmatic statements of belief disguised as agnosticism, and repeated charges of "denialism" (new to me, and despite my having admitted to believing in faeries & the paranormal!).

Simply put, my relative certainty that Strieber and other abductees are prematurely positing the presence of something nonhuman is based on discovering a mountain of evidence for human manipulations, as well as direct correlations between Strieber's experiences and his own psychological issues, patterns, and so forth (consistent with waking phantasy), all of which was so overwhelming to me that I had to relinquish my once firm persuasion that a magical, faerylike nonhuman element was indeed involved. This is the sort of evidence that is relevant here, and which Mike has shown zero interest in inquiring about. To me that suggests he is not genuinely exploring the question, much less leaving it open, but only trying to keep this conversation away from such inquiries, by announcing that, since "I don't know" is apparently the only honest answer, there is no reason to look at any evidence that suggests it might be possible to know, or at least recognize certain errors and delusions, and so get a little closer to the truth.

To be blunt, I have rarely met a firm believer/defender of the nonhuman (much less ET) hypothesis (and make no mistake, Mike is that) who was capable of much by way critical thinking, because every believer is also a denialist, just as Mike is denying my own observations by dismissing them as belief and opinion (and so on). I think it's the nature of the material that, once one takes it to heart, there is a certain loss of critical faculties required to maintain that belief. Maybe this is the "apocalypse of thought" which Strieber & Kripal promise in The Super Natural? :eek:

It is astonishing to me how much work has gone, over the past six or seven decades, into creating this widespread belief in nonhuman beings among us, and how the belief does seem to be powerful to generate experiences, experiences that then act as evidence for the beliefs. What interests me, then, are the ways in which the beliefs have been generated, and shaped, and the reasons for it, more even than the perceptual experiences themselves. Logically, isn't it more useful to explore causes than effects if possible? This is even found in UFO literature: how elements of the UFO experience that become standard first appear in works of fiction.

The other thing I'd say, to Mike and anyone else leaning towards the "just say I don't know" position, is that, what is most reliable in any investigation is always direct experience. If Mike has had direct experience with nonhuman beings (as I once believed I had, and I continue to have the sort that I used to account to nonhuman presence, but which I now leave open), he should put them on the table for examination. Otherwise, all that is being discussed here are fables.
 
Liminalist, I think you posted just above a fair analysis about many of Mike's posts to this thread that were critical and in error in reply to your posts. I think he was also trying to position some of my posts as absolutist with an extremist and inflexible position against certain ET Abduction cases such as Betty and Barney Hill.

I haven't commented about any other specific cases except to say that hypnosis and repetitive regression can not be relied upon to find the truth, when, in fact, there is plenty of scientific evidence that false memories can overlay, replace, alter, and change the original memories when doing hypnosis or repetitive regression. Knowing this to be a serious problem that can confound and potentially destroy or replace the original memories it would be common sense and very wise to eliminate any cases that rely on such potentially false evidence to prove some event such as ET Abductions. This becomes even more of a serious problem, since there is a common widespread cultural mythology and understanding about such events that have saturated the movies, television [i.e. X-Files], online accounts, C2C type radio/podcasts, Strieber's books, etc. etc.
 
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My own "Abduction" experiences occurred as a small child.I had no knowledge of Aliens and thought my abductors to be evil goblins.Only as I read UFO articles as a teen did I become aware of the Grey aliens that resembled my childhood visitors.Our perceptions are guided by our experience and what was once faery folk is now E.T.I believe the experiences I had as a child were a form of sleep paralysis.If I had them now I'm sure I'd recognise my protagonists as being "Aliens".I'm not saying E.T doesn't visit,I just don't think they abduct us.
 
Ron Away,
You make some good analogies on the abduction phenomenon which no one has any answers just theories from eyewitness interviews. However, the phenomenon does seem leave physical traces in some events on the individual whatever it is. Agree sleep paralysis might answer many events which impact people for years. The so called Grey label ? dose not fit all case some are ' hooded figures with red eyes' or ' grey /dark shadow people fighting against 'white /silvery' shadow people . Some case have physical /vibrations that effect the structures outside the home in some abduction/encounters case with odd sounds and lights. Also electronic devices in the home are activated in some case such as radios, lights, T.Vs going off while the powers been turned off or furniture cabinet's doors opening and shutting. How about folks abduction/encounters while driving cars being taken over while passengers are helpless to stop the events happening which the force is able to turn off and on, slow and increase speed of car and able to impact on weather around the car. Police cars seen chasing UFOs while eyewitness stopped by the road in 1960s and unknown officials in black uniforms warning to be quite, . The abduction ( would include encounters) cases are odd and terrifying for those caught in these physical events and don't think we can put all in one basket such as sleep paralysis.
 
Ron Away,
You make some good analogies on the abduction phenomenon which no one has any answers just theories from eyewitness interviews. However, the phenomenon does seem leave physical traces in some events on the individual whatever it is. Agree sleep paralysis might answer many events which impact people for years. The so called Grey label ? dose not fit all case some are ' hooded figures with red eyes' or ' grey /dark shadow people fighting against 'white /silvery' shadow people . Some case have physical /vibrations that effect the structures outside the home in some abduction/encounters case with odd sounds and lights. Also electronic devices in the home are activated in some case such as radios, lights, T.Vs going off while the powers been turned off or furniture cabinet's doors opening and shutting. How about folks abduction/encounters while driving cars being taken over while passengers are helpless to stop the events happening which the force is able to turn off and on, slow and increase speed of car and able to impact on weather around the car. Police cars seen chasing UFOs while eyewitness stopped by the road in 1960s and unknown officials in black uniforms warning to be quite, . The abduction ( would include encounters) cases are odd and terrifying for those caught in these physical events and don't think we can put all in one basket such as sleep paralysis.
Your quite right to point out it's not just Grey's and you make other good points.My experiences that I class as sleep paralysis are very odd.Perhaps I rationalize them this way to fit in with my view of things.
 
BUT. And this is critical to understanding this issue, it is Humans that propagated the ET Abduction experience through the various media outlet communication methods that are so widespread over so many decades [even centuries with folklore symbology] that it is impossible to peg ET doing even one abduction. Humans are just too creative and magical and susceptible as tricksters, story tellers, actors, warriors, mind warps, imaginators, believers, secret hidden agendas, deceivers, money makers, power controllers, manipulative masters of the universe, hallucinators, brain abnormalities, etc. to name just a very few issues with Humans that drive ET down their silly rabbit hole. Too many other Human causes override that possibility considering there is too much Human entanglement and involvement from beginning to end.

That does not mean I disrespect someone's genuine ET Abduction experience as not being real for their sense of understanding. I don't know their motives or life history, etc. to judge what is the likely cause.

Betty and Barney Hill are believable as strictly Human caused events, so ET is the rabbit hole. Also, this case and all that follow were built upon the incredibly defective and unscientific belief that hypnosis and repetitive regressions would verify and recover more and more of the original memories, when the fact is now well established and understood by science that such methods can and do implant false memories that change and/or destroy the original memories. It's a repetitive "brain washing" technique that can bury the original memories. Screen memories is being used in reverse, when blaming ET for doing it. Humans created the ET screen memories.


Whilst I am very wary of hypnotic-regression (and absolutely not learned in psychology), I often find that people fall into two camps regarding the usefulness or not of hypnotic-regression and they are very simply that either people seem to think it is an invaluable tool for bringing repressed memories to the surface, or that quacks use it to lead people to 'remembering' facts that fit in with their prefabricated theory.

All I want to say really is that I wonder if there can be a third option that is hypnotic-regression is capable of retrieving memories that are genuine, when carefully practised by someone who has no agenda? Is it at all possible that H.R can be used to recover memories? Is it used to recover memories in cases that are nothing to do with UFOs or the paranormal?

I am definitely suspicious of the David Jacobs' of the regression world but in the case of Betty and Barney Hill, wasn't the man performing the regression a well-respected psychiatrist who had no interest in Ufology? I would personally feel there would be more validity to recovered memories that seem to involve abduction scenarios if the person conduction the regression had no prior knowledge of the case and certainly someone who is at least agnostic on the subject of UFOs. To have people like Bud Hopkins regularly confirming their previous cases, well, it just opens the whole thing up to suspicion of leading witnesses, maybe unconsciously maybe not but I do not blame the skeptical viewpoint that sees far too much wrong with the set-up before it even begins in each session.

To turn what I've said on it's head a little to further illustrate, are the skeptics saying that every single piece of 'recovered' memory from a H.R must be fantasy? I would have thought it a little easier for the brain to relay real memories than it is to totally create them from scratch all the time?
 
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I haver proven to myself beyond reasonable doubt:


a) that Strieber is lying about certain things and concealing others;
b) that he is or has been in the past affiliated with groups and agencies with a history of mind control;
c) that his own memory and ability to determine what is real is seriously in question;
d) that his experiences are at least partially orchestrated and shaped by human agencies, as part of a larger agenda.
...........................
The other thing I'd say, to Mike and anyone else leaning towards the "just say I don't know" position, is that, what is most reliable in any investigation is always direct experience. If Mike has had direct experience with nonhuman beings (as I once believed I had, and I continue to have the sort that I used to account to nonhuman presence, but which I now leave open), he should put them on the table for examination. Otherwise, all that is being discussed here are fables.
Thanks for sending me down the Whitley Strieber Process Chruch of the Final Judgement rabbit hole as by the time it crossed over into the Manson Family and the Helter Skelter murders, drug and child-sex trafficking, Esalen and the calling up of Magical Beings I finally decided to call it quits. But for those who are interested in such journeys then reading some of the crucial fictions that Jasun refers to may be of interest along with the Holloywood sex and drug scandal story that wants to connect all these dots and manifest Lam like creatures out of the ritualistic ether at the same time. But with such variables in play it really does leave the scene wide open to paint whatever satanic tale you want. Still, I find the ongoing connections to cults, sex, religion, drugs, cosmos power, higher beings/visitors, satanic abuse and abductions etc. to be quite fascinating:

Just Chillin on History: PROCESS CHURCH OF THE FINAL JUDGMENT,HELTER SKELTER, Part 3 of 17

http://crucialfictions.com/wp-content/uploads/Prisoner-of-Infinity-10.pdf

But I have a couple of questions for you Jasun, specifically regarding option d) and the involvement of other human agencies that has shaped Whitley's tales of sex magick and drugs. His stories are highly hallucinatory, and the parallels and bits of clues you posted in your recent article about the "Pain" story and his Process Church connection are still all emmanting from the mind of the writer. How can we know if any of it has any basis in reality? So why bother complicating it further with alien abductions turning into MILAB experiments? Isn't this just replacing one impossible set of events with another?

The really weird part for me was reading one quote where WS talks about he and his brother being brought to a university for secret tests, as highly intelligent children, and then having no memory of the specifics of it all, and I thought hold up, I remember listening to a familiar podcast radio cohost who also told the exact same story about he and his brother going for "tests". He also had foggy childhood memories and an abduction styled/contact event in his own life. I'm not trying to draw any parallels here but it's quite interesting nonetheless.

[CTRL] Whitley Strieber, "Mind Control" and the CIA

Re: putting your abduction experience on the table.

That does seem to be more of a matter of personal choice, no? I don't really see any strong evidence of proven alien abduction, but there are some strange stories told by people whose circumstances merit further contemplation. Pascagoula is one of them with the excellent non-hypnotized interviews in the police station, and the Polish case, Emilcin, is the other whose full story and secondary witness, along with who the experiencer was, makes for the most compelling of all alien abduction tales IMHO. Michalak is also very curious as is the Dechmont Woods case for their uniqe bits of physical evidence. These all speak to more than just stories and they do not fit in any way with humans as instigators.
 
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Hey Honey! Help us land Michio or maybe Uri Milner... Or Elon or Dean Radin or Joe Rogan etc
Chris, for a long time I've thought you should go on JRE and help undo the damage done by Bill Burns on his TV show. You're the level headed guy that can acknowledge the presence of the wakkados while still expressing the legitimate presence of something mysterious. Though the presence of the former doesn't discount the latter, that is frequently what turns intelligent, inquisitive people like Joe away from the subject.

As far as WS goes, he was tripping my internal bs meter the entire interview. To his credit, he did it in a well spoken, intelligent way, but still came off like a self deprecating used car salesman claiming to know nothing while espousing all the answers. You guys handled the interview very well.
 
Have you looked into Kripal's track record & affiliations? I have done my best to ascribe naivete and good intentions on his part, but the evidence is getting difficult to ignore. Ditto Peter Levenda, who interviewed them both for Dreamland and spent a good ten minutes gushing about the luminosity of the new book. :confused:
TBH I've heard Listened to Kripal in interviews and he is highly engaging and thoughtful. Hearing that he teamed with Whitley confused me, but then he is also on about transformative human experiences and the sexual experience so that's an interesting connection & suggestion. What other affiliations does he have?
 
After listening again, my first listen was segmented so i didn't really get the flow of conversation, I'm utterly convinced that streiber is full of it.

His assertion that this book would be seen as a starting point for serious scientific and intellectual study is ridiculous and reminds me of the exopolitics lot who imagine themselves to be the future official galactic ambassadors in a brave new world come 'disclosure'.

Yes, youre gonna be the government/scientific/academic agency's go to guys for the most important project ever.


Just ridiculous delusions of grandeur.
 
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TBH I've heard Listened to Kripal in interviews and he is highly engaging and thoughtful. Hearing that he teamed with Whitley confused me, but then he is also on about transformative human experiences and the sexual experience so that's an interesting connection & suggestion. What other affiliations does he have?
$$$ — the possibility of a huge pay-off...
 
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