The Black Vault

rath..thanks for the link...I'll go check out the previous material---have a great day!

shadowcass wrote:rath..thanks for the link...I'll go check out the previous material---have a great day!

k, you too.

shadowcass wrote:Oh, and Humphreys? Other people HAVE witnessed abductions as well as the sudden return of people who have been abducted. But naturally you wouldn't know that since I'm willing to bet you haven't spent any time really looking into it.

And it wouldn't have taken much effort on your part, either.

Watching Bud Hopkins' lecture here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 887419105# would have filled you in on the "physical evidence" and "witnesses" which you claim don't exist.

Who are you really? Joe Nickell?

(The witness thing comes up during the question and answer session).

I'm linking you to this because I wouldn't ask you to read the books by Mr. Hopkins or by Dr, John Mack (who was Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and who would have disagreed with your interpretation of the phenomena).

It's so typical that I get labelled as closed-minded, and, of course, I just haven't done the research, right, seeing as I don't believe we're being molested by aliens from outer space while we sleep at night.

Give me a break. I have done plenty of research, and I frequent a forum where these cases are put under scientific scrutiny and treated with appropriate skepticism.

I have never seen a case I found remotely convincing.

I didn't say no one claimed to be a witness, I said where is all the footage of alien abductions from the neighbours and such.

Fair question, Humphreys, Old Bean...and I DO owe you an apology. I'm afraid I let my feelings get the better of me in my last response.

I am sincerely sorry for that---we're having an intellectual debate here and I shouldn't have called you names---that was childish of me and I won't let it happen again. If the best we can do is agree to disagree then we'll do that and that will be fine.

After all, just because we disagree on some things doesn't mean we have to be enemies or even that we have to dislike each other. I should have remembered that.
*******************************************************************

Okay...now to the question of "where are the pictures/videos of abductions taking place".

There ain't none as well you know

But let's look at some of the reasons why that might be (leaving aside, for the moment, that the reason there aren't any is because all of the people who claim to have been abducted are either deluded or lying).

Many of these incidents (perhaps MOST of them that don't involve remote locations) take place at night. Yes, I know, "sleep paralysis" and all that. But moving on...assuming you're standing about at two in the morning (or whatever) either on the street or glancing out your window would you have a camera in your hand? I usually don't. Then there's the small matter that many of the vehicles supposedly involved in these abduction cases are not visible to the human eye...some sort of stealth technology, perhaps. David Sereda is rather good on this subject. Not abductions but invisible UFOs
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 561034933#

And the question then arises....even if you can witness someone being "beamed up" then how fast does it happen and how close is your camera?

All I'm saying is that there are some quite logical reasons as to why we don't have any photographic or video evidence.

But let me ask you this: Suppose we DID have such evidence? Would science accept it? Or would they just declare the photos/video to be fakes?

Based on past peformance I think we all know the answer to THAT.
Even if the UFOs were to land on the White House Lawn there would be experts the next day to prove to us that it was all an illusion caused by swamp gas.

Whether science accepts video evidence is irrelevant to the problem of why there isn't any.

As for the unlikelihood of catching an event like this on camera, we have the most astronomically unlikely events on film already. I saw footage of lightning hit a truck just yesterday, and far rarer events like plane crashes from the perspective of the passengers, tornadoes sweeping through buildings, and even footage of ball lightning. Read the statistics on the number of people claiming to have been abducted, and tell me you're not in the least bit troubled, as a believer, in the lack of real footage. Especially in the cases of repeated abductions, why these people did not set up surveillance cameras is beyond me.

Something is going on here alright, I'll give you that, and the phenomena does need study, I just don't agree that aliens is the answer. I would like this to be investigated as a real psychological phenomena in need of understanding.

As you said though, I don't expect to change your mind, or you to change mine, and it is fine to agree to disagree.

Good point about surveillance cams. But perhaps the Extraterrestrials deactivate those the same way they shut off cars in transit and so on?
Remember, unlike lightning and similar natural phenomena, we are dealing with an intelligent and technologically highly advanced species (assuming there's anything to the extraterrestrial angle).

And as for investigating these cases as psychological phenomena I would assume that the late Dr. John Mack and the other psychologists/psychiatrists who have so far dealt with abductees would have BEGUN from that angle and only been forced by what they found to be convincing evidence to admit that the abductions were (at least in SOME cases) actually occurring.

Dr. Mack is on record as saying "When I first encountered this phenomenon, or particularly even before I had actually seen the people themselves, I had very little place in my mind to take this seriously. I, like most of us, were raised to believe that if we were going to discover other intelligence, we'd do it through radio waves or through signals or something of that kind.

"The idea that we could be reached by some other kind of being, creature, intelligence that could actually enter our world and have physical effects as well as emotional effects, was simply not part of the world view that I had been raised in. So that I came very reluctantly to the conclusion that this was a true mystery. In other words, that I—I did everything I could to rule out other sources, or sexual abuse. Some of these people are abused. But they're able to tell, distinguish clearly the abduction trauma from other forms of abuse. Some forms of psychosis or people making up stories—I could reject that on the basis that there was no gain in this for the vast majority of these people.

"I've now worked with over a hundred experiencers intensively. Which involves an initial two-hour or so screening interview before I do anything else. And in case after case after case, I've been impressed with the consistency of the story, the sincerity with which people tell their stories, the power of feelings connected with this, the self-doubt—all the appropriate responses that these people have to their experiences.

"People, in fact, have been observed to be missing at the time that they are reporting their abduction experiences. They return from their experiences with cuts, ulcers on their bodies, triangular lesions, which follow the distribution of the experiences that they recover, of what was done to them in the craft by the surgical-like activity of these beings. "

---John Mack, Interview on Nova

You can read the rest of that interview here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/aliens/johnmack.html

I have read a bit about John Mack, and certainly disagree with his conclusions. He jumps to the conclusion these people were really abducted because they seem completely honest and their lives were changed. However, I believe for this to occur it is only necessary that these people truly believe they were abducted, not that they actually were.

I believe Mack is in the minority in his field for holding the views he does.

humphreys wrote:As for religious experiences, these are no more proof of a god than dreams are proof of dream worlds. All these experiences prove is that someone felt they were in contact with a god or supreme being, without objective evidence that they were really in communication, my hypothesis that these people were experiencing natural brain states is just as valid, especially so now we can create mystical like experiences in a lab by stimulating the brain.

Why does that principle not apply to non-religious experiences? Does seeing (ie, experiencing) your post mean I have no evidence for your existence whatsoever?

Besides, it is not only religious experiences which give us evidence for God.

I believe we had this same discussion already at1, and I think you at least conceded that a problem with mystical experiences is that they are personal and have no affect on the world outside of the senses of the individual experiencing them.

This also means they cannot be measured empirically, and are left solely in a realm where it is no less reasonable to conclude they are purely imaginary (mind created) events.

Should something be considered evidence for God if it can be reasonably explained naturalistically without appealing to a God? I don't think so, and I think by doing so we would be violating Occam's Razor.

My post is real because it checks every criteria we can think of to determine what we label "objective reality". We can all see it, we can interact with it, and we can all measure it whenever we like, and we experience it the same. Whether objective reality it purely real or not, it most certainly is shared, and mystical experiences are not.

We may all be capable of having them, but we are not sharing the same religious experience, we are experiencing a "mind only" event. That's why people label them "personal experiences".

We can even photograph my post - heck, we can break it down further than that and delve deeper into John's website code, and then further still into the server it resides on, and so on, and so on. Sure, this may all be imaginary, but that's a much tougher leap of logic to make than to assume that a mystical experience, which checks all the boxes for being purely a "mind event" is not real - and by "not real", I do not mean mean nothing occurred, as we know, dreams are real in a sense, and everything I have read about the mystical experiences of others puts them solely into the "mind" realm as they do not reach out into objective reality. Otherwise, we'd have some video footage of God walking up to some guy during his religious experience and touching him.

I am not saying these experiences are not real, and I am not saying for certain they are not related to a God somewhere, I'm just saying it's perfeclty reasonable to assume they are not, and that they can be treated like any other natural psychological phenomena.

I also believe these experiences should be expected to occur in most godless Universes with thinking beings and needs like humans.

As for there being more evidence for God, I wonder what evidence someone who thinks God is the same as reality could come up with? Do you have some examples, because it would seem to me your particular theistic Universe should act more or less the same the same as a godless Universe.

Reality is worthy of the appellation 'god' but that doesn't mean 'god' is even the best name for it.
Reality is my "higher power."

Only a handful of people have experienced stars at the edge of the observable universe but that in itself doesn't mean those stars don't exist. I'm sure you can say that anyone can use the astronomer's tools to see what they see and post pictures but still only a handful of people have seen the outer limits. Likewise, there are people out there (gurus/priests/shaman) who have their tools for the God experience (Nirvana, Samadhi or whatever name you wanna give it) and yet more than a handful of people have experienced this that we are talking about. It takes a long time to build a telescope; it takes a long time to learn the tools for having a "religious" experience.