- During the past year Jenning's producers interviewed
me a number of times, and because I sensed what they had in mind, I made,
as a preemptive strike, a number of careful, highly specific observations
about the UFO abduction phenomenon.
-
- All of these crucial points - recorded by ABC on videotape
- were designed to underline the physical reality of UFO abductions and
to demonstrate the implausibility of current skeptical explanations. To
its shame, ABC suppressed ALL of these observations.
-
- I knew, of course, that the skeptics' favorite explanation
du jour is impossibly simple: abduction reports, they believe, are all
due to misperceived "sleep paralysis." Ranking as a distant second
is another erroneous belief: abduction reports, they say, "ONLY emerge
under hypnosis," and since hypnosis is "totally unreliable,"
all abduction reports must be discarded.
-
- In the light of these tediously familiar errors and misstatements,
I made certain in my taped interviews to explain the following:
-
- * In the first two decades of our research, ALL of
the central abduction cases involved people who were outside their houses
when they were taken. NONE were lying paralyzed in their bedrooms. They
were driving cars, walking, fishing, hunting and even, in one famous case,
driving a tractor on a farm. "Sleep paralysis" as a blanket explanation
of UFO abductions is therefore, ipso facto, a ludicrous non-starter. Nevertheless
ALL of my insistent statements on this point were systematically eliminated
by the producers.
-
- * Second, I indicated that there are many abuction reports
involving two, three, six or more people who were taken simultaneously
and whose highly detailed recollections are virtually identical. This fact
alone eliminates not only "sleep paralysis" but "fantasy-proneness"
or any other idiosyncratic psychological aberrations as triggering causes.
My descriptions of these many cases of multiple abductions were likewise
completely suppressed by the producers
-
- * Third, I showed the interviewers many photos of, again,
virtually identical scoop marks, consistent straight-line scars and ground
landing traces at abduction sites, and other physical sequelae. ALL of
these vivid photographic examples of physical evidence were suppressed
by the producers.
-
- * Fourth, I was not alone in making these points. My
colleague Dr. David Jacobs was asked by ABC to carry out a hypnotic regression
for the camera, but since the woman he chose had been abducted in the daytime
while driving a car, the case did not fit ABC's "sleep paralysis"
agenda and was thus not only suppressed, but Dr. Jacobs' many hours of
taped interviews were also scrapped.
-
- * Fifth, I made it very clear that perhaps 30% of all
the abduction reports collected by researchers are recalled WITHOUT THE
AID OF HYPNOSIS, a fact which renders the issue of hypnosis moot. This
point was also suppressed by the producers whose only goal, it appeared,
was to eliminate any data that contradicted their transparently false debunking
hypotheses.
-
- Despite my having presented - and reiterated - the points
above, the producers chose to trot out on camera two debunking scientists
(whose experiments with a mere handful of subjects have yet to be taken
seriously by the psychological community) to buttress the untenable "sleep
paralysis" theory, the false "no physical evidence" claim,
and the demonstrably untrue "its all hypnosis" assertion.
-
- The smug presentations of these two would-be experts
were accompanied by the producers' lurid "reenactments" of "sleep
paralysis" phenomena, complete with flashing lights and spooky music.
The taped testimony of a serious mental health professional like Dr. John
Mack was likewise suppressed, along with my statement that over the years
eight psychiatrists and numerous other mental health professionals had
come to me about their own UFO abductions.
-
- The producers' obvious goal was to conceal the fact that
within the mental health community there are many professionals who look
with amusement on the "sleep paralysis" theory, and who accept
the physical reality of UFO abductions.
-
- So, what can one say about such a deliberately dishonest
presentation as Peter Jenning's "Seeing is Believing" take on
abductions? Perhaps one can only shrug and warn, yet again, that the incurious
members of the press and the many blinkered, conservative scientists had
better collectively pull their heads up out of the sand and join us in
our work.
-
- Whatever one's personal attitude toward the UFO abduction
phenomenon, science insists that an extraordinary phenomenon demands an
extraordinary investigation.
-
- What ABC served up on Thursday night was, instead, an
extraordinary whitewash of the abduction phenomenon, and a brutal suppression
of the evidence for what may well be the most portentous event in human
history.
-
- Peter Jennings and his staff should be ashamed.
-
- BUDD HOPKINS,
New York Friday,
February 25, 2005
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