AREA 51 AND RELATED CONTROVERSIES

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Creatures from outer space have been a fairytale for much of human history. There have been many descriptions of these extra terrestrials by people who say that they have made contact. Some say that they are short and green and others say that they are tall and grey. Many of the reports differ in the description of the aliens, but they all remain the same in one sense, that aliens have made contact with them.

Recently there has been an increase in the number of reported abduction by aliens. The definition of an abductee is: a person who was taken against his/ her will from terrestrial surroundings by nonhuman beings. Beings must take the person to an enclosed space which the person assumes or knows to be a space craft. In this place the person must either be subjected to examination or engage in communication, verbal or telepathic, or both.

A man named Robert Bigelow sent out a survey not directly asking recipients if they had been abducted. Instead he asked these questions:

·        Waking up with a sense of a strange person or presence or something else in the room.

·        Experiencing a period of time of an hour or more in which you were apparently lost, but you could not remember why, or where you had been.

·         Seeing unusual lights or balls of light in a room without knowing what was causing them, or where they came from.

·        Finding puzzling scars on your body and neither you nor anyone else remembering how you received them or where you got them.

·        Experiencing a time when you thought you were flying through the air without knowing how or why.

If the respondent answered yes to four out of five of these questions he assumed that the respondent was probably abducted.

Many abduction stories include experiencing a period of time that you can’t remember. This is possibly an alien piece of technology that represses the abducted person’s conscious memory, causing them to forget the experiences that occur. This technology must not be perfect because the person abducted usually has nightmares weeks after their experience. The person does not consciously remember their experience but they remember it subconsciously. These experiences are remembered through sessions of hypnosis, counseling, or psychotherapy. Hypnosis is in fact helping the patient concentrate on a specific topic. Hypnosis may be an effective way to find out if the patient has been abducted, but it can lead to false information from them as well. The patient might have a subconscious desire to please the hypnotist by giving the information they think they want, even if it is false.

Conspiracy theories and aliens seem to go hand in hand in America. UFO devotees are convinced that there is a government and mass media conspiracy to cover up the alien activity, making it difficult to prove that aliens have landed. It is probable that there is life somewhere in the universe and that some life is intelligent. There is a high mathematical probability that among the trillions of stars in the billions of galaxies there are millions of planets in age and proximity to a star like our sun. The chances seem very good that on some of those planets life has evolved. There is a high probability that natural selection governs this evolution. However, there is a large chance that the result of evolution would yield intelligence, less equal or superior to our own. It is also possible that we are unique…

We should not forget that the closest star, besides the sun, is so far away from Earth that travel between the two would take more than a human lifetime. The fact that it takes our sun about 200 million years to revolve once around the Milky Way gives us a glimpse of how finding a way to travel around the universe quickly and efficiently. We are 500 light-seconds from the sun. The next nearest star to earth’s sun, Alpha Centauri, is about four light-years away. That might sound close, but it is actually 24 trillion miles away. Our fastest spaceship, Voyager, travels about 40,000 miles an hour and would take 70,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri.

Despite the probability of life on other planets and the possibility that some of that life may be very intelligent, any signal from any planet in the universe broadcast in any direction is unlikely to be in the path of another inhabited planet. It would be folly to explore space for intelligent life without knowing exactly where to go. Yet, waiting for a signal might require a wait longer than any life on any planet might last. Finally, if we do get a signal, the waves carrying that signal left hundreds or thousands of years earlier and by the time we tracked its source down, the sending planet may no longer be habitable or even exist.

·        You’re driving along a dark, deserted road when suddenly a UFO appears overhead in front of you. You pull over just as a beam of light radiates from the craft, and you can see five grey-colored aliens descending in the beam. You get out of your car for a closer look. The aliens are rapidly moving toward you, and you think that you’re going to be abducted. What should you do?

·        Do not panic. The extraterrestrial biological entity (EBE) may sense your fear and act rashly.

·        Control your thoughts. Do not think of anything violent or upsetting. The EBE may have the ability to read your mind. Try to avoid mental images of abduction (boarding the saucer, body probes, etc.). Such images may encourage the alien to take you.

·        Resist verbally. Firmly tell the EBE to leave you alone.

·        Resist mentally. Picture yourself enveloped in a protective shield of white light or in a safe place. Picture the EBE handcuffed and behind bars or being audited by the IRS. Telepathic EBEs may get the picture.

·        Resist physically. Physical resistance should be used only as a last resort. Go for the EBEs eyes (if it has any). You will not know what its other, more sensitive areas are.

A widely accepted theory about alien abduction memories is that they result from a harmless but disturbing episode of sleep paralysis. Sleep paralysis occurs when a person half awakens from REM (rapid eye movement) sleep cycle, their eyes open, and they are fully conscious but still unable to move, sometimes still experiencing dream-like hallucinations. People in this state often hear buzzing noises, see flashing lights and figures hovering near their beds, and feel themselves levitating or leaving their bodies. Suggestion by a doctor or mass media portrayals of encounters with space aliens may provide them with an interpretation of the strange experiences.

Twenty-four alleged abductees were recruited for the experiment by advertisement. Eleven had recovered memories of abduction (involving experiences that resembled sleep paralysis). Thirteen had no direct recollections but thought they had been abducted because of various symptoms—scars and marks on their bodies, sleep disturbances, and a panicky reaction to a picture of an extraterrestrial. Both were compared with controls that had no such experiences or symptoms.

All the subjects answered questionnaires on personality, dissociative reactions (such as out-of-body experiences) post-traumatic and depressive symptoms, memory disturbances, body image changes, magical thinking (belief in numbers with special powers), hallucinations, delusions, and ideas of reference (such as the belief that strangers are talking about you).

The abductees were psychologically normal in most respects, but scored higher than controls on measures of depression, perceptual aberration (especially body image changes), and magical thinking. On personality tests, they showed a stronger tendency toward “absorption” -- a characteristic related to suggestibility and hypnotic susceptibility.

The subjects then listened to lists in which all the words were associated with a single theme word not on the list; for example, candy, sugar, sour, cookie, all associated with sweet. After some distraction, the subjects were tested on their memory of the lists. One type of error was false recall—spontaneously recalling a suggested theme that they had not seen. Another error was false recognition –seeing a theme word on a new list and believing that they had seen it before.

The controls and abductees correctly recalled and recognized the same number of words. But the abductees especially those with recovered memories, “remembered” (both recalled and recognized) more theme words than they had actually seen. They quickly developed a general sense of their experience and revised the details to fit.

People with recovered memories of childhood abuse make the same kind of errors on the same tests. And they also score higher than the average on measures of depression and hypnotic susceptibility. The authors conclude that in both cases the memories probably result from what is called a source monitoring error –like believing that the events in a movie happened in one’s own life –a form of false memory to which suggestible people are especially vulnerable.

As a conclusion to my report on alien abduction, I wish to leave you with this in mind. No one has pure physical proof that there are little green men in flying saucers waiting to fry us with their death ray, but many people across the globe believe that they might help or hinder us.

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Last modified: 04/02/08