PET scan
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Scientists have discovered that abductees have post-
traumatic stress syndrome (PTSS), which indicates that
something real happened to them. However, they've also
discovered that people can be made to believe that
something really happened when it didn't and can have real
trauma from this false experience. Abductees display some of
the same stress symptoms as soldiers who've been in battle,
yet scientists skip over the conclusion that perhaps they've
had real experiences and go straight to the claim that this
proves that false experiences can produce real stress.
"This underscores the power of emotional belief," says
Harvard?s Richard McNally. "If you genuinely believe you've
been traumatized and recall these memories, you'll show the
same psycho-physiologic emotional reactions as people who
really have been traumatized."
In laboratory experiments, people were asked to describe
their experiences and their stories were played back to them
while their physical responses were recorded. "When a
Vietnam vet has his experiences played back to him in the lab
of some combat event, his heart rate goes up and you see an
increase in sweating. If you don't have post-traumatic stress
disorder, you don't react that way," McNally says. "The heart-
rate responses and sweating responses were at least as
great in the alien abductees when they heard their memories
of being taken and molested by space aliens and subjected to
experiments as those of people with genuine traumatic
events."
Does this convince scientists that there may be something
real here that's worth studying? Nope, they blame the victim
by claiming that abductees are predisposed to believe in
aliens and UFOs because of their "new age" beliefs,
notwithstanding the fact that many of these beliefs are now
being proved by scientific studies. Also, no research has been
done to find out if people's belief systems change as a result
of their abduction experiences. Lastly, people whose beliefs
don't allow for the possibility of alien life may suppress their
experiences, even from themselves, and may never come
forward to become part of a test group.
Most abductees remember their experiences before they've
been hypnotized or talked to about the subject, and these
are the people who should be studied. One reason hypnosis
of abductees should be avoided or undertaken only with
skilled professionals is that it's easy to plant false memories.
This has long been known and the real tragedy is that these
false memories can crowd out the real ones, and your actual
experience may be lost forever. This is especially true if
touch, taste, sound and smell become part of the story.
Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus says, "It is sensory details that
people use to distinguish their memories. If you imbue the
story with them, you'll disrupt this memory process. It's
almost a recipe to get people to remember things that aren't
true."
False memories can be separated from real ones by having
people describe what they remember while their brains are
viewed with a PET scan. If the sensation, such as touch or
smell, that they remember is real, that area will light up in the
brain. If it's false, it won't. The reason these tests aren't
undertaken with abductees is that PET scan machines are
rare and expensive and scientists don't take abductees
seriously enough to bother to use them.
Read about
the
experiences of one of the participants in the McNally study.
This type of automatic dismissal was once the reaction to
reported sex abuse, especially by parents and religious
figures. Now we know that all too much of this is real. We
need
common-sense facts about UFOs, not pseudo-science.
To learn more,
click here and
here.
