The Black Vault

humphreys wrote:

shadowcass wrote:Spoken in true CSICOP style. If you can't attack the data attack the man. Yet the late John Mack is not the only psychiatrist or psychologist who considers the Abduction Phenomenon to have a basis in reality.

So?

For every one who believes it, I'll find you ten who don't.

shadowcass wrote:The real problem for those who wish to debunk all those who recount these experiences from the late Philip Klass to Joe Nickell and Susan Clancy is that they know nothing about the subject.

Spoken in true believer style. If anyone disagrees, they must not know anything about it, seeing as it so obviously true that we're being molested by aliens in our sleep.

I have a different take on it.

You have a strong desire to believe, as did Mack, and he let that need, as well as the strong belief of his clients, cloud his judgement.

shadowcass wrote:During abduction events, abductees are missing from their normal environments. Police have been called, search parties have been sent out, parents have frantically searched for their children, etc. When people remember abductions, they sometimes return with marks on their bodies – not just any marks, but with seemingly impossible fully formed scars. They sometimes return with broken bones and they have no idea how they happened. Sometimes people return with unusual stains on their clothes that were not there before the abduction. Attempts to discover the nature of these stains have been unsuccessful. They return with their clothes on backwards, and/or inside out. They return wearing someone else’s clothes. When people are abducted, they are often abducted with others who can confirm the details of their abduction, as with Barney and Betty Hill.

The problem here is, you cannot use the vast number of cases and their individual factors to make a general case about the reality of alien abductions, otherwise your judgement will be skewed.

Most of those things you mention are rare. The average case is someone claiming to be abducted in his sleep. There are no witnesses, and no marks that could not have already been there, or caused by trauma during sleep.

There are more exceptional cases, but they must each be investigated individually to assess the reality and reliablity of each particular piece of evidence. When you take a case individually and investigate it, you will often find that each special factor, like witnesses, or a person reported missing, can be explained. Many of the implants are not implants at all, there are, of course, going to be frauds, that's undeniable, some of these people will actually be crazy, some will have been drugged and abused, for instance, the list goes on, but we cannot make blanket statements about the whole field in general like you have and expect it to be convincing.

In my experience, the people at CSICOP et al are very, very knowledgable on the subject, as they would have to be, and they are coming to different conclusions to you.

shadowcass wrote:Often it is family members, but there are instances when friends or bystanders witness the abduction as well. People are abducted while fully awake, driving a car, gardening, and so forth.

And there are cases on record where more than one person claims to have seen a Mermaid, and a vast number of similar accounts of leprechauns and fairies.

Do you believe in all those too?

shadowcass wrote:None of the debunkers have yet to manage satisfactory explanations for these things. Mostly they ignore them because these facts do not fit their pat little explanations.

Well, it's extremely difficult to perfectly piece together even the simplest events after the fact when you were not present, but the debunkers do a good job, for the most part.

shadowcass wrote:The thing is---if your explanation doesn't explain the facts ALL of the facts---you have the wrong explanation.

Nonsense.

shadowcass wrote:And, with that, I'd like to get back to a discussion of the Bible if we could. Since that was what this forum was supposed to be about.

I don't believe I mentioned alien abductions first.