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Contactee Psychology


If you could prove that what has happened to you is beyond human comprehension, you would be able to blow this whole thing wide open. I agree with you that it has nothing to do with aliens. The human mind it capable of creating truly bizarre experiences.

We have to get past trying to "prove" this stuff. What is proof in regards to these kind of experiences anyway? Also if the human mind is causing this, prove it. ;) The human mind didn't cause me and six other people to see a landed disk, and several small black hairy dwarfs with large glowing green eyes, that left hoof prints, that were later seen by other people. That goes beyond the mind playing tricks.

Also, the sleep paralysis thing is NOT non-sense. I've had it and it's terrifying. It happened last night actually and i saw all kinds of weird things. My wife though just saw her dumb ass husband waking her up with his bizarre sleep issues.

I meant it's nonsense as far as explaining "alien" abductions. And how do you know you were not seeing what you saw? Also, when I said they aren't aliens, I did not mean these entities don't exist. Clearly they do, based on the number of people having interactions with them. However, we need a better explanation.

I saw what would be a classic "gray" face when I was about 4 or 5. That would be about 1961, and that image was not part of our pop culture at that time. So I told my mom it was a "skeleton face". Many years later I realized what I had seen. Recently I heard an interview with Michigan MUFON director William Konkolesky, and he claimed to have seen a "skull face" when he was about the same age. What's the odds of that?

But its OK. You would have to be having these experiences yourself to realize what they are not, and that's misinterpretations or hallucinations.

I sincerely believe that we will never have the answer. It's too allusive.
 
I meant it's nonsense as far as explaining "alien" abductions. And how do you know you were not seeing what you saw?

I know because my wife was there and all she saw was me trying to say something and looking paralyzed. I'm of the opinion that sleep problems are the cause of many of these experiences - not all of them, but I'd suspect any of the ones that happen in people's bedrooms can be caused by sleep issues.

So I told my mom it was a "skeleton face". Many years later I realized what I had seen. Recently I heard an interview with Michigan MUFON director William Konkolesky, and he claimed to have seen a "skull face" when he was about the same age. What's the odds of that?

We see faces in a lot of things, so the odds are not all that bad.

Here's an interesting article from Wired about some experiments that are duplicating "alien abductions" and religious experiences in the lab:
Wired 7.11: This Is Your Brain on God

Worth a read.
 
The human mind didn't cause me and six other people to see a landed disk, and several small black hairy dwarfs with large glowing green eyes, that left hoof prints, that were later seen by other people. That goes beyond the mind playing tricks.

What do you think is actually going on then? Given that you are the one having the experiences and not me, I am interested in what you feel, think, or intuit about the phenomena you have experienced.
 
What do you think is actually going on then? Given that you are the one having the experiences and not me, I am interested in what you feel, think, or intuit about the phenomena you have experienced.

What do I think is going on? Well I don't really know. But from what has happened to me, and then from reading other people's accounts, and then books like Jacques Vallee's books, it seems they want to influence what we do. And of course this has been going on for a very long time, back into our ancient history.

I was shown a lot of info, what people would say was being uploaded into my brain, and then told some simple thing about people raising their vibrations, which makes no sense now, and sounds very new age, but made perfect sense at the time. Then I was told to write a book and gather people together and start a movement. That made me uncomfortable, thinking this is how various religions and cults got started. Of course now I can't remember what I was shown, but bits and pieces keep surfacing as insights and thoughts that I never had before.
 
I had written a thoughtful reply to this, only to have the server go down when I went to post it! Let's see if I can remember it all...

I know because my wife was there and all she saw was me trying to say something and looking paralyzed. I'm of the opinion that sleep problems are the cause of many of these experiences - not all of them, but I'd suspect any of the ones that happen in people's bedrooms can be caused by sleep issues.

Well you really don't know that you weren't seeing something that your wife couldn't see. If you read up on these things, people report being in some altered state before the events happen.

As an example, let's look at the events at Fatima, Portugal in 1917. The 10 year old Lúcia Santos saw the apparition. It's reported the two younger children did also, but Lúcia had most of the interactions. Then other people started coming to see the miracle. Everyone saw something, but no one but the children saw the apparition. At one point 70,000 people witnessed a silver disk in the sky that rotated and sent out colored beams of light. Also angel hair fell to the ground. But witnesses told widely varying descriptions of the "dancing sun". Some of these people were several miles away. So clearly there was an actual event that resembled a UFO sighting, and also an event only seen by the children.

Read some of Jacques Vallee's work. This stuff has been going on for a long time.

I've had events in my bedroom, but was not suffering from sleep paralysis as I was able to sit up and look around. But most of the things I have experienced did not happen in my bedroom.


We see faces in a lot of things, so the odds are not all that bad.

We do see patterns. But I saw something in the dark, where there was no background shapes to be confused about, and it moved closer, and got larger, and was several inches from my face. All the while resolving to greater detail. It happened quickly, but wasn't me making shapes out of nothing. Nor were the small black hairy dwarfs me and my friends saw that left hoof prints.

Here's an interesting article from Wired about some experiments that are duplicating "alien abductions" and religious experiences in the lab:
Wired 7.11: This Is Your Brain on God

Worth a read.

I know all about Michael Persinger and the God helmet. That's nothing new. But also, since only a small percentage of people had a paranormal experience while wearing the helmet, you have to wonder what caused that. Was it tuning the brain to allow it to perceive these things?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet

All these things don't give answers to the questions.
 
Well you really don't know that you weren't seeing something that your wife couldn't see. If you read up on these things, people report being in some altered state before the events happen.

My take: I was in a hypnagogic state, I made some noise, and I woke up my wife. She was awake, I was in between. Trust me, I have read up on this topic from all angles and I have reached satisfactory conclusions for what has happened to me.

Just so that we're completely clear, I'll elaborate on my background on this issue and why I feel the way I do about it.

For the longest time I thought I was being abducted by aliens because I would dream about "greys" and UFOs and I would have the exact same symptoms (for lack of a better term) that abductees had. I watched Fire in the Sky and way too much Unsolved Mysteries and put the images into my head. I never had seen aliens before that, where my nightmares had more to do with ghosts or whatever. Later, when I actually looked into it as I became an adult, I realized what was going on - common sleep disorders and vivid dreams. I have always have elaborate, realistic dreams that involved things I was seeing in my life.
Since I understood what was going on and completely lost any belief I had in alien abductions, those types of night terrors and sleep disorders have changed and become much less terrifying (still pretty scary though).

Now, I can't pretend to know what you have seen and I do not want to attempt to explain it because your experiences are completely different from mine. However, the same should apply to what I have experienced. There's no need to add things to the equation by saying that "they" made my wife see nothing while I was being contacted(???). It's unfair for you to pretend to know what happens during my sleep paralysis as much as it is for me to say you didn't see the non-human entities you have seen. Either you saw exactly what you saw, you saw something and mis-interpreted it, or you're a liar. I'll assume it's one of the first two, and if it's the third, well, that isn't cool.

I maintain that the human mind is capable of playing horrible tricks on us.

By the way, this is something that fascinates me about this topic - why do you interpret my experiences one way, and I interpret them another?
Some people will chose to think that I'm in denial that I'm being abducted by aliens, and that's fine. I'll gladly take the time to explain what actually is going on.


Thanks.
 
By the way, this is something that fascinates me about this topic - why do you interpret my experiences one way, and I interpret them another?

Because you seem to have your mind made up with no proof one way or another. I'm trying to be open minded about these types of experiences. "Experts" will write about hypnagogia, or even dreams, but we really don't understand what they are. Consciousness and even reality are not well understood. The real thing with any "visions" is what you get from it. Did anything mean anything to you? Also some people are more sensitive to seeing things.

Now I have never had a dream with grays, or UFOs or anything else in that subject. I have very strange dreams at times, but nothing like that. And my earliest experiences predate all those cultural references. Nor do I have any recollection of an abduction experience. I have posted my various experiences here in the past, but they are always mostly interactions with something unseen. It wasn't until fairly recently that I had the experience with being asked to wrote a book that made me draw a correlation between that experience and what people report as parts of abductions. And this was because of the images I was being shown. And still, I never left the couch I was sitting on, and as far as I know there wasn't any non human entities in my living room. But then I had my eyes closed for the most part.

In regards to abductions, I think it gets back to metaphor. It's all symbolic. The experiences are "real", but the whole medical examination scenario, and even the environment they are in is fabricated for our "benefit". This can easily be demonstrated by looking at past events in human history involving contact with non humans. They might have been seen as "angels" or the Fae, or the Djinn, or what have you. Now they are little gray beings. They might have always looked that way, and the other forms are a facade.

I had an experience when I was about seven years old that for years I just took at face value. Then I thought more about it recently and realized it just wasn't possible. I was outside in my backyard when my attention was drawn towards the sky. There, right above tree top level was a commercial airliner. This would have been in the 60s, so back then they were prop driven and not jets. It was a large four engine plane, and one engine was not running. The propeller was turning very slowly as if from the wind. I could clearly see the windows, and there was a girl about my age waving at me. The plane did not make any noise, or at least was not as loud as it would be if it were that low. I got very excited and ran in to tell my mom. When she came out and it was gone.

Now looking back at it, it makes no sense. So what did I see? I haven't a clue. Remembering this also reminded me that I used to go outside at night with a flashlight and flash it into the sky so planes would flash back at me. Apparently they must have, or I wouldn't have kept doing it, but I can't remember. Once more, what the heck was that all about?

This kind of stuff has been going on for a long time. It cannot be easily explained saying it's all in our mind, and that has the effect of stopping any real research into the matter.

An interesting thing is that young children seem more sensitive to seeing things, and then we grow out of it. My six year old daughter recently told me about a couple of incidents, both of which troubled her. One was hearing a strange voice speaking a language she couldn't understand while laying in bad awake one night. I have heard this same voice once for a fleeting moment. Her other incident was seeing a bunch of "kittens" moving around on the floor of her bedroom.

She said they weren't kittens, but looked like small furry black kittens. She got scared and put the blanket over her head. Now I don't believe she was making up a story or dreaming, because her dreams and stories are quite different from that. They mostly involve dinosaurs!

The small black things reminded me of Terence McKenna's "tykes". In the house where I grew up we had a phantom black cat. You would see it out of the corner of your eye, and then look and it was gone. Sometimes it would appear in front of you when you were walking and you would try to not step on it, but then of course nothing was there. I thought it was odd, but it wasn't until friends started asking if I had a black cat that I took it seriously. I then asked my older brother about it, and he said him and his friends also saw it before I was born. Then I asked my son, who is now 19, and he said he would see it also, but never mentioned it. Then me and a few friends had this phantom big black dog that used to follow my friend Deb around since she as little. We all saw it too. it wold show up in the oddest of places, like jumping out in the road in front of our car.

My point in all this is if you ask enough people if they have had any strange experiences, most will have some stories. It's just that most people don't talk about it. I've been collecting them from people I know, and some are REALLY weird. Like being chased by sticks running as if on stick legs, or having a large noise on the wall talking to you. And these are sane normal people.
It's so common place that it must just be the way things are. But society is "scientific" now, and only material measurable things exist. All the rest is relegated to superstition. But when people keep saying they see something, it would stand to reason that they are seeing something. We can't explain it all away saying they must be mistaken. Maybe reality is glichy?

You do have to be skeptical in the real sense of the word though. For instance I have suffered from migraines since i was a kid, and recently had a scary experience with "scintillating scotoma", where a patch of my field of vision, that started from looking out a window at a bright sunlit day, caused a weird rectangle of spinning triangles and cycling colors. It also prevented me from seeing directly in front of me! I could have attributed it to some paranormal event, but I figured it was associated with a migraine which had not yet started. Not every light in the sky is a UFO.

But at the ripe age of 53, I'm convinced that the world is much stranger than we think. Getting into podcasts like this, and reading up on things, I realize I have had a disproportionately large amount of seemingly paranormal events in my life. And they continue to this day. Many involved other people, and runs the whole gamut from UFOs to poltergeist to things I can't even explain. Then I read about other people with similar experiences.

So psychology isn't the answer, unless we are talking about people who are in constant contact with "space brothers" from Venus. ;)
 
David,

You have an interesting take on the subject. I guess I feel that I do have proof that satisfies me for my particular situation.
I remember when I was a kid I was convinced that I saw the Goodyear blimp hovering just above the lane near my house. Looking back at it, it could not have been that close to the ground, but as a child, my imagination took over.
 
All cultures have their mystics, seers and shamans. Some cultures draw a line between their strange worlds and everyday reality, some don't. I find it especially interesting that Michael Persinger's work shows the same parts of the brain to be commonly active during visionary and mystical experiences. What is experienced seems to be partly archetypal and therefore common to all humans. Other aspects are culturally conditioned. What I find most laudable about Persinger is that he is honest enough to admit the plausibility of hallucinatory experiences as normally unseen but valid realities.
 
I remember when I was a kid I was convinced that I saw the Goodyear blimp hovering just above the lane near my house. Looking back at it, it could not have been that close to the ground, but as a child, my imagination took over.

And maybe it wasn't your imagination. Do you have instances of other times you imagined things as a kid? I sure don't. The fact that it stood out as something extraordinary should tell you something. I've seen lots of blimps, and was always excited by it. I'm sure you did too. I've even seen them moored to the ground at airports. But why did that one look so low to the ground to you while the other ones didn't? People's memories get cloudy over the years, but you do remember certain events clearly because of the impact it made. Especially if it was something you have never seen before. This sounds to me as if you saw something you knew was not typical.

But I think even as a kid you know what you see. For example, I was very adamant with my mom that I was awake when I saw the "skeleton head". She of course thought it was a dream. This is why I don't discount what my kinds might tell me. I can see where my daughter first took what she told me, and then later embellished it for her mom, because that part sounded like her imagination, based on what she normally talks about.

My "skeleton head" (I didn't know the word for a "skull" at that age) event went like this; It was the afternoon and my mom wanted me to take a nap. Of course at that age kids never want to take a nap, and I told her I wasn't tired anyway. But she insisted. At that time my older brother was still living at home, so I had a small bed between my parents dressers in their bedroom. My dad worked nights at that time, so the room's single window had a room darkening shade, and some heavy drapes. So I was laying there in the dark staring at the ceiling. When I'm in the dark I see visual snow. So I'm looking at the static and I start to see it moving around and starting to clump together to form a mass. That wasn't normal. It then formed into this large gray scull like face with large black eye sockets that then moved directly over me, and descended quickly toward my face. I jumped out of bed screaming for my mom! She of course thought I was dreaming. It was very vivid, and I held that memory ever since. I was so traumatized by that incident, that I was unable to take naps in the daytime until I was about 20 years old! Eventually I must have forgotten about it until a few years ago when it popped back in my memory.

It's sometimes comforting to explain away things as a dream or imagination, but I've always been a very observant person, so I know what I saw, even at that age. And my own imagination is not all that scary. :p
 
You do have to be skeptical in the real sense of the word though. For instance I have suffered from migraines since i was a kid, and recently had a scary experience with "scintillating scotoma", where a patch of my field of vision, that started from looking out a window at a bright sunlit day, caused a weird rectangle of spinning triangles and cycling colors.

Thanks for being willing to share so much about your experiences with us.

I always ask experiencers if they have seen a neurologist. In your case I'm betting that you have. Is that the case? If I were experiencing these sorts of things, that would be my first option. I would want to convince myself that there was nothing going on medically or that there were no medical consequences to the experiences themselves for my own peace of mind. If you are under the care of a neurologist have you related your experiences to him along with your migraine symptoms?
 
Thanks for being willing to share so much about your experiences with us.

I always ask experiencers if they have seen a neurologist. In your case I'm betting that you have. Is that the case? If I were experiencing these sorts of things, that would be my first option. I would want to convince myself that there was nothing going on medically or that there were no medical consequences to the experiences themselves for my own peace of mind. If you are under the care of a neurologist have you related your experiences to him along with your migraine symptoms?

I ended up finding the Paracast and others like it because I was seeking others that had similar experiences. So I figure if more people came out with their experiences we would have a larger database of experiences with common threads, and see that something is truly going on here.

My parents sent me to doctors when I was a kid because of the daily headaches. They never found anything. I rarely have them anymore, but had been to a lot of specialists over the years, and had also been treated for general anxiety disorders, which I also no longer suffer from.

So I'm pretty confident that my experiences had/have nothing to do with a neurologic condition, however, I do think that these conditions might actually open you up for similar experiences.

And experiences continue to this day, but are off and on. One thing I have noticed is the more attention you focus on the paranormal, the more often events occur. But the really freaky stuff always came out of nowhere. It's also interesting that in my circle of friends, especially childhood friends, that they too had their share of paranormal events. I'm just finding out about some of those recently, as I re-connect with old friends on FaceBook.

One real weird one is that one of my oldest friends, who now lives in the Philippines, was with me and four other kids when we saw the disk and small black hairy dwarf things (something that seems to be common in South America, but not here). I was talking to another friend that has her share of stries and she told me one that he had told her years ago. I asked him and he told me that when he was a kid he saw what could be described as a "gnome" in his backyard, complete with long beard, funny clothes and pointed hat. 20 some years later, his nephew, who was about six at the time, was taking a nap in an upstairs bedroom. My friend said he heard his nephew crying and when he went to see what was wrong, his nephew said he woke up and saw a small man with a long beard looking at him! What's the odds of that? So you see confirmation of these stories over and over again.
 
So I'm pretty confident that my experiences had/have nothing to do with a neurologic condition, however, I do think that these conditions might actually open you up for similar experiences.

Have you related your experiences to any of the specialists that you have seen then? If so, what was their reaction?
 
I saw what would be a classic "gray" face when I was about 4 or 5. That would be about 1961, and that image was not part of our pop culture at that time. So I told my mom it was a "skeleton face". Many years later I realized what I had seen. Recently I heard an interview with Michigan MUFON director William Konkolesky, and he claimed to have seen a "skull face" when he was about the same age. What's the odds of that?


David, thanks for offering your experiences so candidly. I may be off in my calculation, but it appears that you come off as genuine and are careful to avoid self-censorship.

Just as a sidenote here: I usually avoid offering too much of my personal experiences, mostly due to my paranoia about professional confidentiality, and the general slippery slope that often comes along with such admissions - however, I thought I'd offer this one thing.

I have a recollection of being a child, probably around I977 or so, in where I awoke standing at the window of my bedroom. Outside of that window was what appeared to be a pretty standard UFO hovering silently amidst a landscape of suburban households. The object in my recollection was pretty close to the house, probably less than 50 yards away, and here's the interesting part. I seemed to be locked in a trance of some sort in direct eye contact with a being standing amidst what appeared to be the control room of the ship (amongst others), as this was the only portion of the ship which wasn't rotating. To me, it appeared to be a tall, spindly creature with a cadaverous-or skeleton-like face. I couldn't tell you how long I stood there staring at this thing, but eventually it departed in typically miraculous fashion. When I came to my senses, I remember doddering, shellshocked into my mother's room to tell her about the what I had seen.

Now, yes, this seems to paint a picture perfect scenario for a hypnopompic hallucination - I'm willing to admit and acknowlege the very strong probability of that being the answer to what happened in this case. However, considering where I have come in my personal exploration of this subject matter, I too am not comfortable removing all the intangibles and subtleties of human experience to commit to one answer, and pluralism, connectivism and materialism all seem to be missing essential moving parts of what may lie at the root of such experiences (perhaps there's a good chance this will change, and I suspect it will with further scientific advancement). Undoubtably, I tend to gravitate towards the psychological explanations, mostly those which give credence to trans-egoic states of consciousness. But what I have found entirely more useful and interesting has come with tracking how exposure to such experience tends to transform one's perception and understanding of self and relationship to others. It also seems these types of experiences often inspire (provoke) a curiousity, one that leads a person to open up a dialog about the seemingly innacessible aspects of perception and reality, and these explorations in turn enrichen one's grand narrative about the meaning of life -and sometimes even informs a sense of purpose. Yeah, in some cases it may end up confusing one's perspective even more, and in some cases even dismantles any sense of stability and normality altogether, creating a distorted sense of value and gradioisity, increased psychological vunerability, other things. But you know, for the most part....

Just a thought: however, the skeleton figure seems interesting when considering the evolution of the abductee narrative and the literature heaped around it.
 
awoke standing at the window of my bedroom. Outside of that window was what appeared to be a pretty standard UFO hovering silently amidst a landscape of suburban households.

I've had a similar experience although it was in a dream, as I awoke in bed. Extremely scary. I can trace it back to an episode of Unsolved Mysteries about missing time. Thanks to the wonder of the internet, here it is:


Because of the episode, I had a really hard time sleeping. I truly believed alien abductions were possible. As I said in a previous post though, once I realized this stuff wasn't what it seemed to be, I stopped worrying about and I have had no alien abduction worries since my teens. I still have minor sleep issues and night terrors, but apart from an annoyed wife, the problems are minimal.
 
I've had a similar experience although it was in a dream, as I awoke in bed. Extremely scary. I can trace it back to an episode of Unsolved Mysteries about missing time. Thanks to the wonder of the internet, here it is:


Because of the episode, I had a really hard time sleeping. I truly believed alien abductions were possible. As I said in a previous post though, once I realized this stuff wasn't what it seemed to be, I stopped worrying about and I have had no alien abduction worries since my teens. I still have minor sleep issues and night terrors, but apart from an annoyed wife, the problems are minimal.

Yeah Angel, I've heard that story and I do appreciate you sharing the key to your awakening - however, I just want to be clear. I did not share this story to make myself available for a game of debunker whack-a-mole. I was sharing to share.
 
Yeah Angel, I've heard that story and I do appreciate you sharing the key to your awakening - however, I just want to be clear. I did not share this story to make myself available for a game of debunker whack-a-mole. I was sharing to share.


I also want to be clear, I was not trying debunk anything. I was sharing what happened to me and where I'm coming from. Cool?
 
I would put number one at number three. I don't think that most "abductees" are trying to hoax anyone. I think that they truly believe they have been abducted by aliens. Having experienced the phenomena, I know how real it can feel.

So then reading this statement Angelo, you understand what the phenomenon is....now please tell me what you think is behind it by replying:

1. Why it is that almost every abduction case that I have heard about, having the victim describe the entity or entities which perform this terrible fete, all tell of the same "grey" creature as the type of monster/alien/demon whatever doing the nasty deed? And all of them stating this in different periods of history, many without the advantage we have of media driven influences?

2.Why is it that almost every time we read about or are privy to the case reports, that the various operations, both through the skin as in metal implants, anally, orally, etc. happen to the victims almost all inclusively?

3. If as I understand you believe, that the entire scenario is psychological in nature, then how can it be purported that cases happening all over the world, have described the very same entity? Are we to believe that all of them have been privy to the same E.T. description in the past by the media or other?

4. Do you believe in the "spirit" of a human being?

5. If so, do you believe that just the "spirit" can be abducted, and thus the reason why a second person might have been witnessing the dastardly act without anything happening physically to the victim?

Let's start from there.
 
First off Angel doesn't "know" In My opionion,if he has experienced the "same" thing that Archie Bedford and others here have recounted. His experience seem more "kin" to certain things I've expereinced over the years. I have never seen little grey aliens but have often woken up not able to move and sensing a presence. Real or psycological? I don't know but then again I don't know if there is any difference at that point. Also, since Angel has said he is an athiest then I very much doubt he believes in the human or any other spirit. The problem that I have with fundi Christians or Muslims or avowed atheist or any other "label" is there is no reason to ask them anything at all. The only response from a good Christian is "demonic" or bunk. The only good response from a strong atheist is "bunk" or a mental abberation. Hope I save you two some time. :cool: I lean more into the spirutal/psyhcological perspective. Also, I have had some actual experiences with what some would call "demonic" and can tell you its' different from sleep paralylis or a mental issue. It can mimic it but it's not the same and at it's core it's not that hard to tell it apart. So, at the risk of offending Angel I would say that what he is describing and what some abductees are describing are two different levels of expereince. But, I sound kind of smug and arrogant and for that I apoligise in advance.

Peace.
 
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