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Cracking the Alien Code
Sometimes scientists really annoy me. Take for example this NY Times article about a book by Susan Clancy, a Harvard psychologist who has been studying (and by that I mean debunking) people who have had alien/UFO encounters. The book is called Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens. And you can already tell by that title what her game is: studying how people “come to believe” things, rather than actually accepting the possibility that any of this is true.
In the article, Dr. Clancy is quoted as saying:
“Understanding why people believe weird things is important for anyone who wishes to know more about people - that is, humans in general,”
To me, this begs the question of: why bother learning about humans in general? Why not look at humans in specific? Why look at why people believe weird things? Why not simply accept the experiences of others at face value?
This seems to go back to the philosophical question I posed a while back about how do we know what’s real. On the personal level, what’s real is anything that happens to us: a waking event, a dream, a fantasy, a memory, a psychedelic journey, an alien abduction. But on a social level, what’s real is only the aspects of these experiences that can be verified by other people. And so, we are forced to throw out all kinds of personal first-hand knowledge and experience simply because other people don’t believe we could have really had it.
In any event, Clancy takes the road of “explaining” UFO’s and the like away according to influence from pop culture. If you are an abductee and you’ve ever seen a movie about UFO’s, then you’re simply jumbling up real life with the memory of the movie. Maybe this happens sometimes, but it seems like a flimsy explanation to cover all such phenomena.
Clancy conducted a scientific experiment designing to expose this memory-jumbling tendency:
In a laboratory study in 2002, Dr. Clancy and another Harvard psychologist, Richard McNally, gave self-described abductees a standardized word-association test intended to measure proneness to false-memory creation. The participants studied lists of words that were related to one another - “sugar,” “candy,” “sour,” “bitter” - and to another word that was not on the list, in this case, “sweet.”
When asked to recall the word lists, those with abduction memories were more likely than a group of peers who had no such memories to falsely recall the unlisted word. The findings suggest a susceptibility to what are called source errors, misattributing sources of remembered information by, say, confusing a scene from a barely remembered movie with a dream.
At first glance, you might be like, “Wow, that makes sense.” But let’s look at it again. Just because you’re shown a list of words and you mistakenly remember words not on the list, does that necessarily logically follow that you do the same thing in your personal life and create alien events that didn’t really happen? No, that doesn’t logically follow at all. If you are “misattributing sources of remembered information” on a list of words, then that means you are doing it in this particular instance with these words. It doesn’t mean you do it everywhere at all times; this doesn’t constitute scientific proof at all.
Later in the article, they go in for the patronizing pat on the head so frequently used by secular mythologists:
At a basic level, Dr. Clancy concludes, alien abduction stories give people meaning, a way to comprehend the many odd and dispiriting things that buffet any life, as well as a deep sense that they are not alone in the universe. In this sense, abduction memories are like transcendent religious visions, scary and yet somehow comforting and, at some personal psychological level, true.
And don’t get me wrong, I agree with this 100%. But it’s far far from the whole truth, much less something which we can usefully apply to our lives. It’s easy as heck to punch holes in also. How does a violent or disturbing alien abduction fantasy give somebody comfort and meaning to their lives? More importantly, we could take this paragraph and do a simple word-swapping to highlight the true problem:
[Science] gives people meaning, a way to comprehend the many odd and dispiriting things that buffet any life, as well as a deep sense that they are not alone in the universe. In this sense, [science is] like transcendent religious visions, scary and yet somehow comforting and, at some personal psychological level, true.
It’s also weird that this article closes by Dr. Clancy admitting that she didn’t ask any of her study participants about their religious views. She says that she “regrets” not having done so. So she’s trying to study the nature of belief, but didn’t think to ask them about religion - the bedrock of belief? How does that make any sense at all?
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August 17th, 2005 at 12:58 pm
It seems fairly clear that there is a large-scale ‘experiment’ afoot (for want of a better phrase) to ‘manage’ people’s perception of reality. I suspect that this has been ongoing for sometime and it clearly covers many areas which do not immediately seem connected.
The reports from ABu Ghraib and elsewhere of interrogations which centre around the interrogators showing a detainee a picture of a phone asking them what it is and screaming at them that it is a bomb when they answer correctly as well as the presence there of ‘doctors’ and psychologists is perhaps an obvious example but there are many others in other areas.
If you think about it, the abduction mythos is something built on a similar framework - someone sees something anomalous (whether this thing is ‘placed’ there by someone or is ‘real’ is irrelevant) and obviously this is a ’shock’ out of their experience (this would be paralleled by finding oneself detained) and then someone in power - an ‘expert - attempts to convince them that the experience is other than what they know or believe it to be (this is not a phone/ghost/alien) etc.
If you look you can see this process everywhere. It is particularly prevalent in advertising where the images of ‘enlightenment’ and spirituality are pressed into service in the cause of the most unlikely products - but always twisted 180 degrees in the process.
I’m sure one could find other connections in the realm of false memory for those who have knowledge of that area. I strongly suspect that all these things are connected and are somehow ‘managed’.
August 17th, 2005 at 1:01 pm
I have one big problem with abductee stories that makes me doubt their authenticity. There is zero hard evidence for them. Of course, the healthy skeptic point of view also notes, that there is zero hard evidence against them. You have to, in light of the evidence, sort a phenomenon mentally according to its probability, evidence, and theoretical conjecture. In other words, with zero evidence for or against, the reality of the situation is not resolved, and must be rationalized accordingly.
To complicate matters, its been proven that under hypnosis people tend to dream up all sorts of “memories” of things that didn’t happen, depending on how the hypnotists “begs” the retrieval. Who the heck knows how many of these abduction stories retrieved from hypnosis are bunk and how many are real?
Clancy betrays a limited imagination by writing a book on the assumption that these experiences are FALSE in light of no evidence. She has just as much freaking hard evidence as the people who demand them to be absolutely true: none. This is begging the question in the truest sense: she is proving aliens don’t exist on a method that relies on an assumption that aliens don’t exist.
August 17th, 2005 at 1:09 pm
Yes, someone should conduct a scientific investigation into scientific investigators and the nature of their world view and publish that…….well, I’d buy it!
August 17th, 2005 at 1:14 pm
Dude, Abu Ghraib is such a perfect example! This kind of crap is Orwellian doublespeak, more or less.
“Noooooo its not torture! It’s using extensive necessary methods to protect our freedom from evil terrorists!”
And what about the word “terrorism?” When the US CIA blows up a car in front of a mosque to kill a “terrorist” Imam in Beirut (and misses the target), it isn’t terrorism, it is “protecting our freedom using whatever means necessary.” When we help a guerilla regime blow up cars in Afghanistan, they aren’t terrorists, they’re “freedom fighters.” Stand up against linguistic tyranny! Don’t let the archons use our memes against us!
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said,…”it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
August 17th, 2005 at 3:49 pm
“Why bother learning about humans in general? Why not look at humans in specific?”
That is the crux of ‘pataphysics: the science of governing the properties of exceptions to the rule.
August 17th, 2005 at 4:12 pm
science isn`t equiped to allow for the overwhelming “evidence”,of the reports that people keep making regarding experiences that have become known as alien. science is in some ways a mechanism for continual disproof. to say that alien experiences have been disproven is untrue. the reports keep coming in from around the world.
the only certainty is that science continues to get it`s “disproofs” funded. those reporting the experiences are motivated by different things.
the scientist in the article above showed that people can make word associations in error. to suggest that this also shows a bias to cognitive errors in other areas is unproven. she is showing (not quite proving) her own bias regarding the subject.
articles like this suggests that there are some who would like us to doubt some aspects of human experience. alien abduction/encounters fall into that category. whole sections of the bible have been edited out for discussing these same entities, why would modern science act any differently?
August 17th, 2005 at 7:00 pm
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August 21st, 2005 at 7:34 am
Leave the political opinions to blogs that are pertinant sparcidget. You insult us all by bringing your plotical view into a discussion that has nothing to do with the topic at hand. Very rude
August 21st, 2005 at 3:23 pm
I think that there is a culture of anti-ufology within the scientific community due to the importance of reputation (aka pride/ego/shame). Most scientist are not willing to take risks with ideas or concepts that happen to fit the facts but do not correspond to the political reality. In 50 or 100 years, that generation of scientists will look back as we do on scientist that claimed that the Earth is flat.
Remember, the human brain does not want to be shamed or die. And most brains would rather die than be shamed. So, although the above mentioned scientist is applauded by her colleagues at this point in time, in the future (if anyone remembers her work), she will not enjoy the same appraisal.