Sweetpumper, on 26 April 2012 - 03:57 PM, said:
Off the top of my head, whether you believe him or not, you can't tell me Whitely Strieber is stupid. I also read a book by a doctor who claims she is an abductee. I can't remember her name though.
Whitley Strieber, who has written several books about his alleged abductions, came to the realization he had been abducted by aliens after psychotherapy and hypnosis. Strieber claims that he saw aliens set his roof on fire. He says he has traveled to distant planets and back during the night. He wants us to believe that he and his family alone can see the aliens and their spacecraft while others see nothing. Strieber comes off as a very disturbed person, but one who really believes he sees and is being harassed by aliens. He describes his feelings precisely enough to warrant believing he was in a very agitated psychological state prior to his visitation by aliens. A person in this heightened state of anxiety will be prone to hysteria and be especially vulnerable to radically changing behavior or belief patterns. When Strieber was having an anxiety attack he consulted his analyst, Robert Klein, and Budd Hopkins, an alien abduction researcher. Then, under hypnosis, Strieber started recalling the horrible aliens and their visitations.
Another contributor to the mythology of alien abductions is Robert Bigelow, a wealthy Las Vegas businessman who likes to use his money to support paranormal research and who partially financed a Roper survey on alien abductions. The survey did not directly ask its 5,947 respondents if they had been abducted by aliens. Instead it asked them if they had undergone any of the following experiences:-
--Waking up paralyzed with a sense of a strange person or presence or something else in the room.
--Experiencing a period of time of an hour or more, in which you were apparently lost, but you could not remember why, or where you had been.
--Seeing unusual lights or balls of light in a room without knowing what was causing them, or where they came from.
--Finding puzzling scars on your body and neither you nor anyone else remembering how you received them or where you got them.
--Feeling that you were actually flying through the air although you didn't know why or how.
Saying yes to 4 of the 5 "symptoms" was taken as evidence of alien abduction. A 62-page report, with an introduction by John Mack, was mailed to some 100,000 psychiatrists, psychologist and other mental health professionals. The implication was that some 4 million Americans or some 100 million Earthlings have been abducted by aliens. As Carl Sagan wryly commented: "It’s surprising more of the neighbors haven’t noticed."