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?
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.
