The True Story of the Worlds First Documented Alien Abduction: Disbelievers and Disinformants
The fourth type of scientific activity is the most relevant. These are events involving unexpected observations by untrained personnel of events involving intelligence (such as automobile accidents, airplane crashes, bank robberies, rapes, and so on). Here, eyewitness testimony can be crucial, and scientific methodology may be used to measure skid marks, blood alcohol levels, DNA samples, brake lining thicknesses, and so on. We can be certain that about 40,000 Americans will be killed in automobile accidents each year, even if we can’t determine what will happen to which car, where, or when. We can use science, after the fact, to provide much useful data. Obviously UFO sightings fit into this last category of events.
Courts have long since had to learn how to evaluate testimony whether by experts on fingerprints or blunt trauma, or by just plain witnesses. That is why there are prosecutors and defense attorneys. One must be far more accurate in describing a bank robber (height and weight to 20 percent just isn’t good enough), but estimates of velocity including zero miles per hour, vertical soundless flight, right angle turns without exhaust or visible external engines don’t have to be either reproducible or terribly accurate to separate the wheat from the chaff. The statistical cross comparison between unknowns and knowns in Project Blue Book Special Report 14 is of particular interest here. The fact that, based on six different characteristics, the probability that the unknowns were just missed knowns was less than 1 percent, is of special importance.
The star map was also the focus of an attack from The Amazing Randi, a noted magician and busy member of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Paranormal (CSICOP )—now known as the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry). Sagan was also a member, along with Klass, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov (also a UFO debunker), and other skeptics. Randi discussed the Hill experience in his aptly named book Flim Flam. He writes, “It was immortalized in John Fuller’s book Incident at Exeter.” Hardly! There are all of 6.5 pages about the Hill case in Incident at Exeter but 350 in Fuller’s Interrupted Journey. Randi says, “It seems evident that Mrs. Hill saw the planet Jupiter, talked her husband into believing it was a UFO, and then imagined she had been taken aboard and made to forget the experiences, which she remembered only after a dream of the supposed event kept recurring. But when she had her story in full bloom, Betty Hill was able to suddenly recall—three years after the event—that she had seen a navigation map in the control room and she sketched it for posterity. This map is one of several said to support the Hill claims.” The reader will recognize that this is a totally inaccurate, false, and misleading description of the Hill case. Both Betty and Barney observed the UFO through binoculars. Sketches of what they saw are in The Interrupted Journey. A report of the sightings was made very soon after it took place.
The sessions with Dr. Simon lasted a period of several months—suddenly recalled? Betty didn’t use the term “navigation map,” and who says she was in a control room as opposed to medical examination room? After all, there are many kinds of maps. We travel a great deal and use city maps, state maps, country maps, and even a globe. The latter wouldn’t be of any help in finding a street address in a big city. But it could, for example, be very helpful in trying to plan a trip to Hong Kong and then Dalian, China.
Now Randi did admit to the existence of Marjorie Fish, but surely doesn’t get the story straight. He says, “She somewhat rearranged the viewpoint and redrew a section of the constellation Reticulum to con- form.” Everybody who has examined the models and the publications should recognize that she did an enormous amount of work building more than 25 accurate 3-D models of our local galactic neighborhood, some with as many as 250 stars. Although the base stars are indeed in the con- stellation Reticulum, the others are not. Randi doesn’t seem to know that a constellation is a relatively small region of the sky whose stars are at nearly the same angular direction from the Earth, but in most instances, not close to each other at all. Randi, as did Sagan, shows totally misleading sketches with points and single-dashed, straight lines. There are no curved lines or solid lines.
There have been many claims by interested readers attempting to refute Fish’s explanation. One Charles Atterberg wrote many letters and worked on coming up with another set of stars, but without having the solid basis found by Fish. His claims were discussed by Dickinson in “Zeta Reticuli Update.” A Soviet astronomer claimed that the base star had to be Alpha Centauri; no adequate basis was given. A German re- searcher, Mr. Joachim Koch, has been insisting that the alien actually showed Betty a map of the solar system and that several of the points of light were asteroids. This more or less ignores the fact that asteroids change their locations very rapidly compared to stars. Also of course the aliens were on planet Earth and not on one of the asteroids. No good basis is provided for why certain asteroids were chosen and others ignored. It is interesting indeed that nobody built detailed 3-D models; none provided new scientific information or a solid basis for their conclusions as did Marjorie Fish.
One of the most recent and least scientific attacks on UFOs in general and abductions in particular can be found in the 2005 book Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens by Dr. Susan Clancy, Harvard University Press. She is a psychologist with a Ph.D. from Harvard and had been involved in other published papers, such as “Memory Distortion in People Reporting Abductions by Aliens” and “Psychophysiological Responding During Script-Driven Imagery in People Reporting Alien Abduction,” as well as appearing in the Peter Jennings ABC UFO show on February 24, 2005, and on a Larry King UFO show on July 6, 2005. She seemed, on TV, to be claiming that all abductions could be explained away as sleep paralysis, and seemed ignorant of the contrary evidence, such as people who report that they have been ab- ducted from many locations outside their bedrooms and while driving, working, walking, and so on. In the book, she explains that she had been working on false memory syndrome in people who may have been sexually abused as children. There was a serious problem of determining whether or not they really had been abused. She thought UFO abductions would be much easier because: “Here was a group that had repressed memories, but the memories would be much less painful to hear about than memories of childhood sexual abuse.”8 She provides no data to substantiate this claim. Dr. Simon had noted to Dr. James E. McDonald that the intensity of emotion in some of the hypnosis sessions of Betty and Barney Hill exceeded that of any soldiers with whom he had worked. Clancy goes on: “Even better, alien abductees were people who had developed memories of a traumatic event that I could be fairly certain had never occurred….
I needed to repeat the [false memory] study with a population that I could be sure had recovered false memories. Alien abduction seemed to fit the bill.” She would use the same techniques as with the sexual abuse people, and addressed the “corroboration issue since it was certain the event hadn’t happened.” Surely a scientific study about UFO abductions can’t start with the presumption that such events have never happened.
She got her study population by advertising in newspapers, “seeking ‘sub- jects’: Have you been abducted by aliens?” Considering that the late Dr. John Mack (1929–2004), a psychiatrist, who as a full professor at Harvard, had worked with more than 200 abductees (some of whose experiences are discussed in detail in his books, Abduction and Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters), one might have thought she would, if not investigating any abductions herself (she did not), have dealt with nearby people whose cases had been investigated by an outstanding professional. They would have, in general, been much closer to Boston than most of the subjects helped by Budd Hopkins of New York or Dr. David Jacobs of Philadelphia as discussed in their books. She makes the truly incredible claim that “I believe I have read every account of alien abduction ever published and just about every- thing that social psychologists, psychoanalysts, postmodernists, journalists, physicists, biologists, and ex-military personal [sic] have to say about them. I’ve watched nearly every American movie and TV show ever made about aliens.” Her text clearly indicates that this claim is nonsense.
Here is a typical example of her inaccuracy. Speaking of a meeting with a number of abductees, she says: “Highlight of Saturday evening was a conversation with two brothers from Manchester, New Hampshire. These men were relatively well known abductees who had written a book about their experiences. One night in the late 1960s they had been canoeing on a lake in Maine and had seen weird lights across the water. A few years later one had fallen down an elevator shaft at work; he’d suffered brain damage, developed epilepsy, and became severely depressed.” The simple fact of the matter is there were four people involved, not two; the event took place in August of 1976, not in the 1960s. The book The Allagash Abductions was written by an experienced abduction investigator, engineer Raymond Fowler, and not by the brothers. It was based on data obtained independently from each of the four. The book is not even referenced, though there are 146 items on the reference list.