From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Tue Sep 26 2006 - 05:50:27 MDT
> Also, from my experience, talking about flying saucers /per se/ won't get
> you banned.
Ah, good... in that case, I'll take this opportunity to point out a
study my father did years ago,
http://crab.rutgers.edu/~goertzel/UFO.htm
in which it is found that people who claim to have been abducted by
UFO's also have statistically uncommon likelihood of claiming to have
seen ghosts, to have had out-of-body experiences, etc.
Of course, this doesn't PROVE that UFO abduction is a psychological
delusion ... after all, it could be that the aliens particularly enjoy
abducting hallucination-prone people, so as to give themselves a more
effective cover story ;-)
The most amusing thing about this study was that it got my dad's
picture in the National Enquirer once, with the headline "TOP
UNIVERSITY RESEARCHERS REVEAL 8 MILLION AMERICANS MAY HAVE BEEN
ABDUCTED BY UFO'S" ... a misleading but not false headline. He was
pleased to be called a top research professor, though the National
Enquirer is not the most reputable source for such claims. But the
Enquirer article itself completely ignored the main finding of their
research, just focusing on the fact that a lot of people reported UFO
abduction. Basically the Enquirer article represented the research as
saying exactly the opposite of what it did.
I do find it fascinating the degree to which various people who claim
UFO abduction fairly consistently claim to see aliens with the same
shape of head, and other common characteristics. But this is not so
different from the tendency of everyone who takes hallucinogenic drugs
to see the same sorts of visual patterns -- such as spirals, tunnels,
etc.
-- Ben
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