The True Story of the Worlds First Documented Alien Abduction: Disbelievers and Disinformants
She apparently feels she has exhaustively studied the UFO phenomena as well as abductions: “So far as we know, there is no evidence that aliens exist. You can’t disprove alien abductions. All you can do is to argue they’re improbable.” No argument is given. She herself supplies a good reason for her disregard of facts and data: “The confirmatory bias— the tendency to seek or interpret evidence favorable to existing belief or reinterpret unfavorable evidence is ubiquitous, even among scientists.” She certainly provides ample evidence of her own such bias. In a holier- than-thou fashion she states, “We don’t accept the alien abduction explanation because there is no external evidence to support it.” Strangely, she never discusses the several thousand physical trace cases that Ted Philips has collected from more than 70 countries. He has visited several hundred such sites. About 16 percent of these cases involve reports of strange beings. There is no mention of the missing time cases wherein other people confirmed the missing time. She never mentions Marjorie Fish’s star map work, though she does mention the Hill case.
She says, “Betty had spotted a bright star that seemed to be pursuing them. Nervous, they had turned off the main highway onto narrow mountain roads, arriving home two hours later than expected.” If she had read The Interrupted Journey, she would have known this was simply false. It does sound similar to the Parade Magazine article by Carl Sagan, which makes a similar false claim. The fact is that they had both observed the large object at close range with binoculars. They had observed its strange motions, certainly not star-like. It crossed in front of the moon. There was a double row of windows through which Barney recalled seeing strange beings, without hypnosis. We have never heard of stars that look and act that way. She says, “Betty was a long time believer. Betty was a fan of science fiction movies featuring aliens (she had seen Aliens from Mars), and had already read Donald Keyhoe’s Flying Saucers Are Real.” These comments are not only not backed up by any evidence, but are total fiction. Betty read the book after the experience, had not been a sci-fi fan, nor seen that movie.
Clancy says “Betty and Barney were advised to undergo hypnosis in order to determine whether, as she firmly suspected, they had been abducted.” Their purpose was to see if Dr. Simon could get rid of Barney’s ulcers and to find out what had happened during the missing time. Clancy claims, again falsely, that Barney had watched “The Bellero Shield,” a science fiction story on The Outer Limits television program, and that his drawing of the alien is based on what he saw. But he and Betty were far too busy to watch science fiction movies. An artist we know watched “The Bellero Shield” and indicated that the alien’s features did not match drawings done in response to Barney’s description, and was also much taller. Obviously Clancy had not done her home- work. She clearly hadn’t examined John Fuller’s papers at the Boston University archives not far from Harvard. These contain many comments from Dr. Simon.
Further demonstration of Clancy’s “confirmatory bias” and her ignorance is given by her claim, “Betty and Barney Hill—the mom and pop of abductees…became famous in abduction history in the 1960s because, in the words of Seth Shostak, an astronomer associated with the SETI Institute ‘They were more or less Mr. and Mrs. Front porch.’” They were the first abductees; there was no real history before them. Furthermore, an interracial couple in New England in 1961 could hardly be considered Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch, whatever that is supposed to mean. In addition, no reasonable person could consider Seth Shostak an expert on any aspect of ufology, much less abduction. His books and papers do maintain that there is nothing to UFOs—without any references to the many large-scale scientific studies published by scientists who, unlike Shostak, have done in-depth investigations.
Clancy also never mentions the large-scale scientific studies either.
She almost discusses the Condon Report with this strange comment: “In 1969 the National Academy of Sciences sponsored a study of all the avail- able evidence on UFOs. The Conclusion ‘On the basis of present knowledge the least likely explanation of unidentified flying objects is the hypothesis of extraterrestrial visitations by intelligent beings.’” These comments are from a brief summary by the NAS at the beginning of the 965- page Condon Report. The NAS did not sponsor the study. The U.S. Air Force did. The NAS Review Committee did no investigation itself—not one single case. Buried in the volume is the simple fact that, according to a UFO subcommittee of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 30 percent of the 117 cases studied by Condon’s people could not be identified.
Clancy also misrepresents the facts of the Travis Walton abduction case as reported in Fire in the Sky and discussed by him in UFOs ARE Real. She claims that Kenneth Arnold in his very well-known June 24, 1947 observation of nine UFOs, was flying his own private jet, even though it has always been correctly described as a propeller-driven airplane. She really blows a fuse about Roswell, getting dates and events wrong with this proclamation: “The evidence for a crashed spaceship and dead extraterrestrials was entirely anecdotal, consisting of first-hand reports from people who wished to remain anonymous, and even more tenuous second- and third-hand reports (so-and-so told what’s-his-name who told me that such-and-such really happened 30 years ago).” For one who claims to have read just about every book ever written about UFOs and seen every movie, this is pure nonsense. Stanton’s book Crash at Corona: The Definitive Study of the Roswell Incident (with Don Berliner) and numerous other books name loads of witnesses. The Fund for UFO Research assembled a 105-minute documentary Recollections of Roswell with first- hand testimony from 27 Roswell witnesses, all of whom are named.
It is not at all surprising that a blurb on the back cover of the book, by Elizabeth Loftus, one of the leaders of the false memory syndrome group, says “Abducted is an enormously brave, smart, original book.” It is indeed brave and original to spout so much false information.
Dr. Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic Magazine, as might be expected, truly admired Clancy’s book. He is quoted on Amazon.com with “Clancy offers a superb contribution to our understanding of human memory, mental anomalies, and how the mind works.” This qualifies as another example of confirmatory bias. Shermer, in a TV documentary on Roswell, said he would believe in aliens when he was shown an alien body.
Nobody else’s personal testimony that they have seen aliens would be good enough for him. Another fairly new book, focused almost entirely on the Hill star map, is Interpretations of an Alien Star Map by William McBride, published in 2005, by PublishAmerica (Baltimore). It is small, having only 131 pages. There is no bibliography and no index. There are a host of stars noted, a primer on astronomy and star names, constellations, and discussions about Marjorie Fish’s work on Joachim Koch’s solar system explanation, the James Randi map, Charles Atterberg’s study, and McBride’s own interpretation. McBride seems to think Betty and Barney were abducted, but that Marjorie Fish’s work is badly flawed. Unfortunately, he starts from the premise that because, according to Einstein, things can’t go faster than the speed of light, 39 light-years is much too far away, and he looks for other stars much nearer, with the very bright star Sirius (only 8.6 light-years away) as the base star. He seems to be unaware that as one gets closer to the speed of light, time slows down so that from a pilot’s point of view, long distances don’t take very long.
Also, the fact that the base is 39 light-years away doesn’t mean that the aliens had to come here directly from there. Stanton once lectured at 25 colleges in 35 days in 15 states without being home at all between the time he left and finally returned. McBride also ignores the fact the Fish’s pat- tern of stars are all in a plane, that Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli are the closest (to each other) pair of sun-like stars in the neighborhood, and that they are a billion years older than the sun. He acts as if she limited her attention to sun-like stars, ignores or is unaware of Dr. George Mitchell’s comments about the accuracy of her work, and uncritically cites some of Sagan’s objections. He tries to make the size of the circles on the map for the base stars an indication of the size of the star. Because stars, even the largest, are so much smaller than the distances between them, there is no way size and distance can be represented to the same scale.
McBride used star catalogs on the Internet, but doesn’t reference his specific sources. He does note that there are many different star cata- logs. Past history tells us that, until the Hipparcos satellite distance data was available, most distance data was not very accurate at all. But McBride gives distances to three decimal places, such as 8.163 light-years. He seems to think that aliens would live on planets near any type of star: old, new, hot, or cold. He points out, as if it mattered, that planets have not yet been found around many of the pattern stars, implying that there are none there. The fact of the matter is that with our current very crude extra-solar planetary detection techniques, planets the size of Earth can- not yet be detected; only quite large gaseous giants usually orbiting very close to a star can. Absence of evidence is not evidence for absence. Microscopes couldn’t observe viruses until recently either, yet they were there.
A distant object on the ground or in the sky doesn’t represent much of a threat, but abductions imply a loss of control, something which some people can’t handle. Many persons willing to allow for the possibility that some UFOs are alien spacecraft are still unwilling to accept the notion that Betty and Barney or anybody else has been temporarily abducted and returned, often with a missing time experience. Perhaps anybody who accepts that some Earthlings have been abducted also has to admit that he, or some- body he knows, may be abducted, which makes it a very personal and threatening. If a signal is received from a transmitter in a solar system 1,000 light-years away, there is hardly a threat. If, on the other hand, aliens are abducting Earthlings from down the street, that is another matter entirely. Denial is a very common response to threatening situations: “No, my teenagers can’t be taking drugs,” and such.
Clearly the zealous attacks on UFOs in general, and abductions in particular, seem to be based on bias, ignorance, laziness, and unwilling- ness to look at all the evidence. Perhaps a graduate student at Harvard in the psychology department could do a study on “The Resistance Amongst Certain Academics to Alien Visitations and the Notion of Abductions by Aliens.” There is certainly plenty to work with, not the least of which were the very nasty and irrational attempts to get Dr. Mack stripped of his tenured professorship at Harvard. Mack fought and won that battle, though his interview with the Peter Jennings TV people remained on the cutting room floor.