<link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5CSteve%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com<img src=" images="" smilies="" redface.gif="" border="0" alt="" title="Embarrassment" smilieid="2" class="inlineimg"></o:smarttagtype>I have been listening to the paracast regularly and reading the forums intermittently for about a year and a half, since late 2008. As a matter of fact Gene, it was Budd Hopkins and Leslie Kean who personally recommended the paracast to me so you have two fans there who actively promote the show.
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I registered because I may have something to contribute to this discussion.<o></o>
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Some background: after a lifetime of “experiences” I finally worked out late in life that there might be a UFO-abduction connection only after becoming acquainted with the literature. The trigger event happened in 1972 when at age 16 I had a close encounter with a large daylight disk whilst fully awake and outdoors, with 2 hours 15 minutes of seamless “missing time” and a new, unusual physical scar discovered shortly after the encounter. At the time this bizarre experience made absolutely no sense and there was nothing in the public domain in 1972, especially in provincial <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1>England</st1> </st1:country-region>in that pre-internet age, which might have helped explain any of this. There were other incidents, but the 1972 one disturbed me the most over the years – and I never, ever spoke about it to anyone because well, what the heck could you say?<o></o>
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Starting in 2007 (I knew almost nothing about the subject until then) I finally read all the books of Budd Hopkins, John Mack, Ray Fowler, Dave Jacobs, John Fuller, C D B Bryan and many others. Things began to fall into place, slowly and with big shocks and paradigm shifts. I have two different “scoop-mark” scars, one behind the right shoulder which is large and prominent and matches similar ones on other suspected abductees. Budd Hopkins has shown me photos of a hundred or so of these he has on file, and they all look like mine. I have recently met other people with these scoop scars and they’re all similar and some quite large. So: something strange is definitely going on, and it ain’t just with me. And it ain’t “sleep paralysis” or any of that bunk either: that’s just a stupid, pointless distraction which has nothing to do with this phenomenon. What we’re dealing with is something real and physical.<o></o>
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In the published works of Budd Hopkins and Dave Jacobs in particular I was shocked to discover many of their research findings dovetailed exactly with my experiences, right down to the intergenerational component and a number of other factors too subtle and detailed to go into here. I underwent a couple of sessions with a registered and qualified medical hypnotherapist working for the UK Health Service to attempt to recover some memory of the events (long story & no space for it all here but <st1>Nick Pope</st1> was peripherally involved and very helpful). However although this did assist memory recovery of some details, the spin this particular hypnotherapist put on the phenomenon, with which he was quite familiar, was too “new agey” for me and just didn’t sit right. I worked with a second medically qualified hypnotherapist in the <st1:country-region w:st="on">UK</st1:country-region>, with a practice in Sheffield, before deciding to contact abduction researchers in the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1></st1></st1:country-region>USA and eventually (another long story) through persistence was able to meet both DJ and BH.<o></o>
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I have met Dave Jacobs on a number of occasions and visited him at his home in Philadelphia, but all the memory-recovery sessions I have done with him (about 15, I don’t have an exact record but he does) have been conducted by skype with a webcam. It is very unusual for Dave to work remotely with people, but as I don’t live in the USA and wanted to work with him it was the only practical way to proceed. When we originally discussed the idea he said he had only ever worked with one other person remotely by phone because she initiated contact (Dave never initiates contact with any abductee/suspected abductee, ever) and persuaded him to as she also lived outside the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1>USA</st1></st1:country-region>. With his experience of “Alice”, her “meltdowns,” five-times-a-day obsessive phone calls followed by the vilification campaign which by then was in full swing (it’s been going on for 3 years, only coming to more widespread public attention very recently) he was naturally wary of me to say the least, as well he might be. However he was finally persuaded after we’d been talking for a few weeks and had met me in person, for which he has my eternal gratitude and appreciation. As you probably know he never advertises, makes no promises or claims and never charges anything so any suggestion of “practising medicine without a license” is complete bunk and rightly is going to get absolutely nowhere.<o></o>
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It seems to me from reading this thread that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about “hypnosis.” All that happens in my experience is a state of deep relaxation which can assist memory recovery. That’s it. Dave’s technique is pretty much exactly the same as that used by the medically qualified and certified hypnotherapists I worked with in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1>England</st1> </st1:country-region>but he’s better at it because he gives a lot of time to the person and knows what questions to ask. You can’t “mess with people’s heads” by using hypnosis. That’s just ignorant and misinformed. I am always fully aware of what is going on. To claim that a hypnotist can plant something in someone’s mind without his/her knowledge or consent is to fail to understand hypnosis and how it works, or else comes from a deliberate liar perpetrating fraud. Sorry to be so blunt, but that’s how it is.
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Sometimes I remember things, sometimes not. I don’t see how people can be “led” to remembering or believing something that didn’t happen, though of course know about “confabulation” in theory. In fact, in my experience most of the memories come AFTER the hypnosis session: up to three or four weeks later whilst engaged in some normal mundane activity a startling abduction-related memory just emerges and you think “but I always knew that – how could I have forgotten?” Well, this is just the subconscious digging up buried memories once you’ve asked it to in the right way, and you can do this yourself without assistance if you have forgotten something you need to remember. It’s not rocket science.
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In my extensive personal experience, DJ is highly ethical and has a very professional attitude, with no agenda to push. The strongest “lead” I ever had from him was something like “so…what happens next?” Performing this kind of hypnosis is something anyone can learn to do. You don’t need to be a Professor of Psychiatry any more than you need to have a Masters Degree in Engineering to drive a car: it’s just a skill which anyone can learn. In my admittedly limited experience professional, trained, qualified hypnotists with medical credentials are not always good at it – not as good as DJ, anyway, and certainly not as agenda-free where this particular phenomenon is concerned. Bear in mind I am talking from personal experience of working with two different medically qualified, credentialed hypno-therapists on memory recovery.<o>
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After the session, DJ spends as much time as I want – sometimes several hours – discussing everything. I emphasise, I talk and he mostly listens. If I ask about the memories he will say “Yes, bizarre as it seems I have heard that from at least 100 different people” or conversely, occasionally “I never heard that before, ever, but I heard something vaguely similar twice before.” The vast majority of what abductees remember and reveal in these sessions is not in the public domain, for obvious reasons of control. I fortunately now remember quite a lot of detail about recent incidents (the past two years or so) without any hypnosis, so don’t need it as much. But it’s absolutely invaluable, essential in my view – to understanding the abduction phenomenon, because of the extremely knowledgeable neurological manipulation of the abductors. This ain’t a fantasy: it’s what happens. Most people don’t remember what is done to them without hypnosis though some remember parts which bleed through, and a minority of people seem to be able to constitutionally resist the memory-blanking and remember almost everything with no assistance from hypnosis. There is no essential difference between the narratives of the minority of abductees with fully conscious memory who never undergo hypnosis, and those who need this tool to open the subconscious to assist the memory process: the stories are pretty much the same and match even in quirky and minor detail.<o>
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There’s a lot more I could say about this whole area, but that’ll do for now. I hope it sheds some light. But I will say in conclusion that to go on about hypnosis being only valid when done by a medical practitioner or a qualified psychiatrist, in my view, reveals little acquaintance with the subject. And finally, my considerable personal experience of DJ is of a thorough and ethical researcher, very bright and knowledgeable with a great sense of humor, who has done more for the genuine understanding of this phenomenon in all its vast complexity than most people will ever know.<o></o>
