Encounters: The UFO Phenomenon, Exposed!/Encounters - The UFO Phenomenon, Exposed (1995).iso/misc4/misc148.txt

Internet Message Format | 1995-10-20 | 41KB

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From: [e-mail] (Sheldon Wernikoff)
Newsgroups: alt.paranet.ufo
Subject: Abduction Article, 1/7
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
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 * Originally By: John Powell
  * Originally To: All
  * Originally Re: Abduction Article, 1/7
  * Original Area: BAMA UFO (Fido)
  * Forwarded by : Blue Wave v2.12


 _Dark Side of the Unknown_ by Patrick Huyghe.  (OMNI, ISSN 0149-8711,
 Copyright 1993 by Omni Publications International Ltd., 1965 Broadway,
 New York, NY 10023-5965.  Published monthly with a subscription rate of
 $24/yr.)

                        Psychiatrists and psychologists
            with advanced degrees are investigating the mysterious
                      realm of kundalini, UFOs and ghosts.

  Tell us about it. Terrorized by little gray creatures with large black
 eyes who whisk you away from your bedroom at night?  Plagued by
 poltergeists rattling the bookshelf and hurling pictures from the wall?
 Haunted by the ghost of a loved one, say, or precognitive dreams that
 turn suddenly real?  Whatever the nature of your encounter with the
 unknown, you may have been left physically drained or emotionally
 scarred.  Chances are, you've confided in no one, fearful friends and
 relatives would consider you insane.  So where do you turn?

  Actually, you have some options. You might, for instance, place your
 trust in someone who makes a business out of the unknown.  you saw the
 movie; you know the tune. Who you gonna call?  Ghostbusters!  If it's
 psychic troubles you've had, you call a parapsychologist.  And when it
 comes to possessions and visions and such, there's always the minister,
 rabbi, or parish priest.  On the plus side, you can be fairly confident
 these people will believe you.  On the other hand, if your trouble is
 even partially psychological, how much help would they be?

  That's where mainstream psychologists and psychiatrists come in. If
 you're hallucinating, they might have a treatment or cure.  But don't
 expect them to believe you.  They'll dismiss your story as a raving
 fantasy, and if you can't shake the episode, you may end up diagnosed
 with schizophrenia and on antipsychotic drugs.

  Not what you had in mind?  Then consider your third option: the new
 breed of mental-health professional now contending that such other
 worldly experiences are legitimate and commonplace among the sane.
 That's not to say they accept the reality of alien abductors or
 precognition or ghosts - though much to the horror of their colleagues,
 a few of them have.  But what many of these therapists have come to
 believe over the past five years is that such experiences - regardless
 of their cause - are common among normal, healthy people, and that those
 who find themselves traumatized by such episodes are just as deserving
 of psychological ministrations as those who suffer anxiety, depression,
 or the trauma that follows a plane crash or a rape.

  To signal the birth of this new discipline, some dedicated
 professionals have even formed a group known as TREAT, for clinicians
 and physical and behavioral scientists interested in the Treatment and
 Research of Expe ienced Anomalous Trauma.  TREAT, which holds a
 conference each spring, deals with everything from reports of UFO
 abduction and precognition to near-death episodes, satanic possession,
 and alleged contact with the dead.   Another favorite TREAT area is
 kundalini - often perceived as a burning. vibrating, or electrifying
 sensation associated with meditation or any other heavy duty spiritual
 chore.

  By all indicators, TREAT is a movement whose time has come.  Indeed,
 every national poll on the paranormal confirms just how widespread such
 experiences are.  A 1992 survey by the Roper Organization, for instance,
 suggests that 2 percent of the population, or 1 of every 50 adult
 Americans, exhibits the symptoms that sometimes mask a UFO abduction
 experience.  A 1987 study conducted by Andrew Greeley and colleagues at
 the University of Chicago showed that 42 percent of American adults
 reported contact with the dead, 67 percent claimed ESP experiences, and
 31 percent reported clairvoyance.  And a 1981 Gallup poll showed that an
 extraordinary 15 percent of all people revived from the cusp of death
 reported the spectacle of the near-death experience in which they
 glimpsed such generic signposts as beckoning loved ones or a tunnel of
 light.

  One must not, of course, mistake these experiences for proof of their
 reality.  "Truth should not be defined by what people believe," warns
 Harold Goldstein, a psychologist in the division of epidemiology and
 services research branch of the National Institutes of Mental Health.
 "Facts are facts.   Now it may turn out that there are aliens and such
 things, but there needs to be evidence for it, and belief is not
 evidence."

  Then again, say the professionals on the frontier of the new
 psychology, beliefs should not be dismissed.  "Paranormal experiences
 are so common in the general population," psychiatrists Colin Ross of
 Dallas and Shaun Joshi of Winnipeg, Canada, said in a recent issue of
 the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, "that no theory of normal
 psychology or psychopathology which does not take them into account can
 be comprehensive." Such experiences, they say, could be studied
 scientifically, "in the same way as anxiety. depression, or any other
 set of experiences" without making "any decision as to whether some,
 all, or none of them are objectively real."



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From: [e-mail] (Sheldon Wernikoff)
Newsgroups: alt.paranet.ufo
Subject: Abduction Article, 2/7
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
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 * Originally By: John Powell
  * Originally To: All
  * Originally Re: Abduction Article, 2/7
  * Original Area: BAMA UFO (Fido)
  * Forwarded by : Blue Wave v2.12


  That may sound good in theory, but some observers wonder whether it's
 really possible in practice.  Therapists, it turns out, are no more
 immune to the potent lure of the unknown than any one else.  Unwary
 specialists of the human mind may, in fact, be particularly prone to
 accepting the reality of their patient's fascinating tales.   And
 enchantment can lead to obsession.  The psychoanalyst Robert Lindner
 admitted as much in 1955 after coming under the spell of a patient who
 provided detailed accounts of visits into the future reality of another
 planet.  To help the patient, Lindner studied the mass of written
 records Kirk had prepared, noted the inconsistencies, and confronted him
 with the errors.  That effort forced cracks in the fantasy and led,
 eventually, to Kirk's recovery.  But Lindner, meanwhile, become so
 absorbed in the story that he had difficulty extricating himself from
 its grip.  In his classic book, The Fifty-Minute Hour, he admits to
 skirting "the edges of the abyss."  Now, some 35 years later, the latest
 mental-health professionals to flirt with UFO abduction, the near-death
 experience, and psychic phenomena face this danger as well.

  One mental-health worker to dive headlong into the dark pit of the
 unknown in recent years is psychiatrist Rima Laibow.  Her sprawling
 office in the upscale Westchester County town of Hastings-on-Hudson, New
 York, is ringed with the big fluffy pillows she uses in holding therapy,
 originally designed to repair early attachment deficits in autistic
 children but now used with other serious chikdhood and adult problems as
 well.  Dressed in blue slacks and a blouse, her frizzy hair tossed to
 one side, Laibow recalls her first professional journey through the
 looking glass.  "lt was 1988," she explains, "and a patient whom I had
 known for many years came to me in a state of anxiety and panic because,
 out of the corner of her eye, she had caught sight of the cover of
 Communion."

  The patient, a 43-year-old cardiologist, had never read this 1987
 best-seller by horror novelist Whitley Strieber, didn't know that it
 concerned alleged encounters with UFO entities, and had never been
 interested in the subject of alien abduction at all.  Despite all this,
 after glimpsing the cover of Communion, she claimed terrifying memory
 fragments of encounters with creatures like those on the book's cover.

  "Such notions had always struck me as psychotic," Laibow explains,
 "but this patient taught me otherwise." Convinced that her patient
 showed no sign of major psychopathology, in fact, Laibow came up with a
 different diagnosis for the sudden breakdown the cardiologist
 experienced following recall of an alleged alien encounter:
 posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

  According to the most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
 Mental Disorders, PTSD is a stress reaction triggered by various
 external events "outside the range of usual human experience."
 Triggering events, the American Psychiatric Association's manual goes on
 to say, include such atrocities as rape, war, and natural disasters like
 earthquakes or floods, which are "usually experienced with intense fear,
 terror, and helplessness."  In fact, Laibow's patient met all the
 criteria for PTSD but one.  "There had been no known trauma," recalls
 Laibow, "so I thought, how could she have PTSD when we all know there
 couldn't possibly be an external event like an alien abduction could
 there?"

  Over the  weeks that followed, Laibow worked to quell her patient's
 anxiety and panic.  But the doctor herself remained genuinely puzzled.
 In search of answers, she read all the literature she could find on
 reported alien abductions and spoke to the primary investigators in the
 field: New York artist Budd Hopkins, who had written two books on the
 topic, and Temple University historian David Jacobs, who, like Hopkins,
 had become a kind of folk guru and de-facto therapist for UFO abduction
 victims.

  "What I found," Laibow states, "left me both impressed and appalled."
 She was impressed, she says, because "there's a substantial body of data
 suggesting that under some circumstances, at some times, for some
 reason, there are things in the atmosphere we call UFOs that appear to
 have external physical reality."  But she was appalled because from her
 "sad and shocking experience, UFOlogy as it exists today is little more
 than a collection of belief systems vying for dominance. The field is
 plagued by the notion that just collecting neat stuff is the same as
 doing research.  If I were the National Science Foundation, I wouldn't
 fund this research, either."

  Hoping to change all that, Laibow began by giving UFO abduction and
 the whole gamut of experience with unexplained phenomena a new, more
 respectable name.  "Experienced anomalous trauma," she called it, so
 that "professionals, who would otherwise stop listening because you've
 mentioned UFOs, parapsychology, and other weird things would now stop
 and process those three words in relation to each other and ask, 'Like
 what?' "

  The strategy worked.  In fact, with the name experienced anomalous
 trauma as a draw, Laibow found dozens of psychiatrists and Ph.D.
 psychologists intrigued by her ideas.  To take advantage of the
 momentum, she formed an umbrella organization for the Treatment and
 Research of Experienced Anomalous Trauma, or TREAT, and held the group's
 first meeting in May 1989.



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From: [e-mail] (Sheldon Wernikoff)
Newsgroups: alt.paranet.ufo
Subject: Abduction Article, 3/7
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
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 * Originally By: John Powell
  * Originally To: All
  * Originally Re: Abduction Article, 3/7
  * Original Area: BAMA UFO (Fido)
  * Forwarded by : Blue Wave v2.12


  TREAT quickly attracted some big guns in the mental-health community.
 One was John Wilson.  A professor of psychology at Cleveland State
 University, Wilson is one of the pioneers in the field of posttraumatic
 stress disorder. He helped both to coin the term and to formulate a
 definition of the disorder as far back as 1980.  In the past two
 decades, Wilson has listened patiently to more than 10,000 people
 traumatized by somc major life event and has conducted major studies of
 PTSD in Vietnam combat veterans and victims of toxic exposure.

  Wilson's own curiosity with the unknown dates back to childhood, when
 a neighbor of his worked for Project Blue Book, the notorious Air Force
 effort responsible for investigating UFOs.  When the abduction
 phenomenon emerged, he began to wonder what symptoms the alleged victims
 would report.  "The most obvious answer," he says, "is that they would
 have PTSD."

  According to Wilson, in fact, those who report memories of UFO
 abduction find themselves in the same sort of psychologically stressful
 dilemma as those who have been exposed to invisible toxic contaminants
 such as hydrogen sulfide.  "They aren't sure about it," he explains,
 "not sure anybody is going to believe them, don't know how to stop it,
 and don't know how long it has gone on.  But the big difference is that
 those claiming a UFO abduction don't even know if it occurred for sure.
 If you've been exposed to a toxic chemical, you can usually have a
 toxicologist come and study your house, and they'll say, yeah, it's
 there, or it's not.  But someone who's had a UFO abduction experience
 can't point to the flying saucer or the little gray guy with the
 almond-shaped eyes.  That puts them in a really psychologically
 ensnaring position."  In fact, Wilson places UFO abductions and exposure
 to invisible toxic contaminants in the same general category of
 traumatic experiences as childhood sexual abuse and psychological
 torture, calling them examples of "hidden events" that may lead to PTSD
 but which often can't be proven real.

  Wilson isn't surprised by his colleagues' slow reception to anomalous
 trauma.  "Fifty years ago, mental-health professionals didn't believe in
 childhood abuse," Wilson notes.  "When kids or adults would report
 incest experiences, sexual molestation, or rape and went to see a
 mental-health professional, they were told, 'That's a fantasy; that
 doesn't happen; it can't be real.'  It wasn't until the Sixties that the
 American College of Pediatrics even did a study to find out what was
 going on.  And then, voila, it was out of the closet, and today we have
 hard data on childhood sexual abuse.  There is a parallel here to
 anomalous experience; whether it's UFO abduction or demon possession,
 our culture says no."

  But as far as Wilson is concerned, the cultural disbelief system will
 change as anomalous trauma becomes a diagnostic subcategory of PTSD.
 "American culture is on the leading edge of this material," he says,
 "and my prediction is that within five to ten years, the idea of
 experienced anomalous trauma will get the serious consideration it
 deserves."

  Indeed, with Wilson's stamp of approval and Laibow's promotional
 drive, other psychiatrists and psychologists have begun to come around.
 One already going that route is kundalini expert Bonnie Greenwell, a
 California-based psychotherapist and author of Energies of
 Transformation.  This "energy phenomenon," as Greenwell calls it, has
 been described by Hindu mystics and practitioners of Yoga as an
 "awakening" of spiritual energy that supposedly "sleeps" at the base of
 the spine.  But kundalini awakenings, considered the beginning of the
 process of enlightment by masters of the technique, can result in
 serious psychological disturbance as well.

  And that's where Creenwell comes in.  Even those seeking the kundalini
 experience can find it painful, she explains, and for those not
 expecting it, the experience can be a nightmare.  Indeed, those
 undergoing the kundalini experience don't seem to know what hit them
 because they are unaware that it might be triggered by anything from a
 physical trauma or emotional shock to a long-term spiritual practice or
 dose of LSD.  What's more, says Greenwell, the experience may be
 accompanied by visions and trances, the sensation of leaving the body,
 and alternating periods of ecstasy and despair, symptoms that could lead
 to pathological diagnoses by conventional shrinks.

  But Western medicine is not alone in its ignorance of kundalini,
 according to Greenwell.  Many spiritual teachers don't have a clue what
 to do with it, either. "Some teachers will tell them it can't be
 kundalini or it would feel good," she says.  "Others tell these people
 they're having a breakdown.  There are even cases in Buddhist retreats
 where people have been taken to psychiatric hospitals when they had a
 kundalini opening.  Many people who teach yoga or meditation are not
 developed to the extent that they have gone through this process
 themselves.  It's very unfortunate, and it's one of the major reasons I
 started doing what I do."

  Greenwell's craft includes helping those troubled by kundalini tap the
 positive aspects of the phenomenon while discarding the negative as
 quickly as they can.  "Once they understand the process as essentially
 positive in the long run," Greenwell says, "they are no longer afraid of
 it and can often work it out quite effectively on their own."




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From: [e-mail] (Sheldon Wernikoff)
Newsgroups: alt.paranet.ufo
Subject: Abduction Article, 4/7
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 2 Sep 93 06:43:00 GMT
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 * Originally By: John Powell
  * Originally To: All
  * Originally Re: Abduction Article, 4/7
  * Original Area: BAMA UFO (Fido)
  * Forwarded by : Blue Wave v2.12


  One person Greenwell saw over come the problems of kundalini was
 Sarah, born after her father's death in 1918.  During childhood, Sarah
 spent numerous hours communing with her deceased father and as an adult
 used that same impulse to meditate.  Listening to high-frequency sound
 and visualizing the inside of her body, Sarah began feeling waves of
 kundalini along with terrifying visions:  In one, she was cut up piece
 by piece, and in another, her body was invaded by swords.  In the end,
 Sarah managed to control her terrors by expressing the creative energy
 of kundalini in the form of dreams, dance, movement, and art.

  Other clients, Greenwell adds, have been far more distressed by
 kundalini energy than Sarah.  In these severe cases, she notes, "the
 person struggles to get control of a body which involuntarily forces
 them into motions or freezes them in action, locks pain into the back
 and shoulders or into the site of any preexisting injury, and flushes
 them with intense heat and cold.  Such subjects occasionally fall into
 trance or report that they are leaving their body.  They may be blinded
 by lights upon entering a dark room or feel they're being electrocuted
 in bed."

  Depending upon who these people consult, says Greenwell, they may be
 diagnosed with any number of disturbances from schizophrenia to grand
 mal epilepsy.  That's just what happened to Cathy, who experienced
 periods of intense, trancelike states, extreme sensations of cold, and
 "unusual energy flows" moving upward from her feet to her hands.  Given
 medication for everything from psychosis to seizures, Cathy finally
 decided to abandon all conventional treatment and accept her symptoms as
 "spiritual" in nature, coming from energies beyond.  It was this
 acceptance, Greenwell claims, that resulted in an immediate improvement
 in Cathy's health and enabled her to give up antiseizure drugs and
 integrate her experiences in a positive way into her life.

  Greenwell probably sees more patients with kundalini problems than
 therapists on the East coast, perhaps because kundalini is largely a
 California phenomenon.  The high percentage of meditators out West, she
 concedes, means "you have a lot of people primed for the experiences."

  Those who suffer from spiritual traumas, kundalini or otherwise, can
 also access another West Coast resource the Soquel, California-based
 Spiritual Emergence Network, or SEN, a telephone referral service
 (408-464-8261) founded by Christina Grof, who with her husband,
 Stanislav, pioneered research on the altered state.  "We get about 150
 calls a month" says Deane Brown, a therapist and the Network's program
 director.  "People call us when something is happening that they don't
 understand.  The volunteers who answer the phone come from a variety of
 backgrounds and many of them have experienced some critical or
 frightening period of spiritual emergence of their own.  So they can
 truthfully say to the caller, 'I know what you're going through; I've
 been there.'  What we do, essentially, is listen.  That's the greatest
 gift that we can give to a caller.  We don't judge the content of what
 they say.  We respond to the feeling rather than the content. We never
 diagnose."

  After talking to the caller for a while, SEN volunteers provide the
 name and number of one of the 500 people in the SEN database.  These
 people range from psychiatrists and psychologists who are familiar with
 the SEN philosophy of "spiritual emergence" to shamans, psychics,
 healers, or clergy in the troubled caller's area.

  "The types of calls seem to go in cycles," notes Brown.  "We will
 often get a lot of the same calls at about the same time from all over.
 For a while we may get a lot of kundalini calls.  Then we may get a lot
 of psychic opening, including out-of-body experiences, telepathy, and
 uncanny coincidences.  Other callers report possession, psychic attack
 by demons, and the like."

  Despite the common goals of workers like Greenwell and Laibow,
 however, the TREAT movement has run into some trouble of its own.  The
 reason: Laibow's strong resistance to the pioneering group of workers
 without professional credentials who aided the spiritually traumatized
 in the first place, years before it became fashionable for those with
 degrees.  The biggest rift was caused by her refusal to accept artist
 Budd Hopkins, author of the classic volumes Missing Time and Intruders,
 and the individual who brought the plight of UFO abductees to the
 attention of physicians and the general public when everyone else was
 ignoring them or calling them insane.  Laibow's beef: Hopkins and others
 had been hypnotizing the alleged abductees to elicit their tales, and
 they had no business doing so "since their formal training amounted to
 just about nil." Such "wannabe clinicians," she believes, can be very
 dangerous, indeed.

  Says Laibow, "There's a huge difference in being able to induce a
 hypnotic trance and being a clinician who knows what to do when you've
 got a trance, who knows how to not contaminate the material, and who
 knows how to facilitate recovery rather than cause retraumatization
 because people can be retraumatized by the unconscious repetition of
 their material.  And what do you do if a UFO investigator does you
 clinical harm by taking on clinical responsibilities?  Where is his
 malpractice liability, and how are you going to be protected?  People
 who are not willing to take the time and the effort to become clinicians
 should not be stomping around in the unconscious."



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From: [e-mail] (Sheldon Wernikoff)
Newsgroups: alt.paranet.ufo
Subject: Abduction Article, 5/7
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 2 Sep 93 06:43:00 GMT
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 * Originally By: John Powell
  * Originally To: All
  * Originally Re: Abduction Article, 5/7
  * Original Area: BAMA UFO (Fido)
  * Forwarded by : Blue Wave v2.12


  Though many professionals agreed with Laibow's argument, others felt
 it was unjust to throw out those who had brought the phenomenon to their
 attention in the first place.  As Hopkins himself said, "Where have all
 the mental-health professionals been all these years while these people
 were clamoring for help."  In fact, the dispute has done little to
 diminish Hopkins' influence, who continues to bring mental-health
 professionals into the fold.

  One of Hopkins' recruits is Harvard Medical School psychiatrist John
 Mack, author of the 1977 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Lawrence of
 Arabia.  Though he is the most prominent and respected member of the
 mental-health profession to take an interest in anomalous experiences in
 recent years, Mack is not a pretentious man.  The photo from a Boston
 Globe profile shows him standing in a field wearing corduroy slacks and
 a plaid shirt, his soft gray-green eyes staring calmly at the camera.
 Unlike most therapists who take an interest in these matters, Mack makes
 no attempt to hide the fact that he is "open to what these people are
 telling us."

  Mack met Budd Hopkins in January 1990, and was impressed both by the
 man and the case histories of alleged UFO abductions he had collected
 over the years.  "The stories didn't sound at all like dreams or
 fantasies to me," says Mack, his voice resonant with authority.  "It
 sounded like something real was happening.  And I thought, well, if this
 is real, what is it?  Then Budd asked if I wanted to see some of these
 people, and I realized I was crossing some kind of line, but I said
 yes."

  Since then, Mack has heard abduction stories from people of all walks
 of life.  "Forty years of psychiatry," he says, "has given me no way to
 explain what I'm encountering in my interviews and hypnosis sessions of
 these individuals.  Something is going on; something is happening to
 these people.  I'm convinced of it."

  In fact, Mack has done as much as TREAT to bring anomalous trauma to
 center stage in the professional domain.  He has spoken freely with the
 media about his interest and has given talks and participated in private
 conferences on the subject.  Colleagues who hear him speak often raise
 the issue of whether UFO abduction stories might not be covers for
 episodes of sexual abuse and incest in childhood.  But according to
 Mack, the reverse has been the case.  "There is not a single known case
 of the thousands that have been investigated where exploring or looking
 into the abduction story revealed behind it an incest or sexual-abuse
 history," he says, "but therapists looking for incest stories have come
 up with UFO abduction memories instead."

  Mack understands his colleagues' reluctance to delve into the subject.
 "It's so shocking to the paradigm of psychology and psychiatry, which
 tend to look for the source of the experience in the psyches of the
 people who are affected rather than to acknowledge that something
 mysterious is happening to these people.  The phenomenon is not simply a
 product of their mental condition but has some kind of objective
 reality.  Whether you call it extraterrestrial or other-dimensional,
 what it really means is that we may live in a rather different universe
 from the one Western science has told us we live in.

  Mack speaks of vast philosophical implications for this phenomenon and
 human identity in the cosmos.  "There's really a great fear of opening
 up our world beyond what we know," he says. "But we need to get out of
 the box we're in and see ourselves in relationship to the universe, and
 I think this phenomenon could be very important in expanding our sense
 of ourselves."

  Mack's daring views are not shared by all therapists involved in the
 dark side of the unknown.  "If aliens are coming and invading us and
 abusing us in a very literal sense," argues Toronto psychotherapist
 David Gotlib, "then it's difficult for me to understand how a
 significant portion of those who are taken could find it curious or
 enlightening.  If you compare it to the Holocaust or the Vietnam War or
 any kind of traumatic event, then sure you can learn to grow through it,
 but only after a lot of pain and soul searching, and not right away. So
 it discourages me from subscribing to a literal explanation.  It also
 suggests to me that the phenomenon may be dependent on who's
 experiencing it as well as on what's happening.

  Gotlib has thought a lot about UFOs since 1988 when he began treating
 a woman who had been turned down by other therapists because she claimed
 her anxiety was due to an alien abduction.  He has now seen 40 such
 patients and publishes the Bulletin of Anomalous Experience so that his
 150 subscribers in the mental-health professions can network and
 exchange ideas on UFO abduction reports and related phenomena.  "I don't
 expect to solve the puzzle or have the puzzle solved in my lifetime,"
 notes Gotlib. "These kinds of things have been going on for hundreds of
 years.  I think if we start trying to solve the question definitively,
 then we're chasing our tail.  What I'm most concerned about is, how can
 we help these people?"



 -!- Blue Wave/QBBS v2.12 [NR]
 ! Origin: *** Odyssey Fringe Science Echo *** 1-205-739-1469 (1:3607/20.0)
 * Tossed by SFToss v1.02 on 93/09/01  02:53:30
 ___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.12
  - JetMail v1.14a3 - Unregistered QWK Mail Door for Spitfire

--
Sheldon Wernikoff - via ParaNet node 1:104/422
UUCP: !scicom!paranet!User_Name
INTERNET: [e-mail]

Path: demon!zaphod.axion.bt.co.uk!uknet!pipex!uunet!spool.mu.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!news.bu.edu!att!csn!csn!scicom!paranet!p0.f31.n1012.z9.FIDONET.ORG!Sheldon.Wernikoff
From: [e-mail] (Sheldon Wernikoff)
Newsgroups: alt.paranet.ufo
Subject: Abduction Article, 6/7
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 2 Sep 93 06:43:00 GMT
Sender: [e-mail] (newsout1.26)
Organization: FidoNet node 9:1012/31.0 - ParaNet ALPHA, Lincoln NE
Lines: 110


 * Originally By: John Powell
  * Originally To: All
  * Originally Re: Abduction Article, 6/7
  * Original Area: BAMA UFO (Fido)
  * Forwarded by : Blue Wave v2.12


  Gotlib sees his next patient and 50 minutes later calls back to answer
 his own questions.  "Basically, what we have to do is listen to them
 without judgement.  You let them know that there are a lot of other
 people who have had these kinds of experiences, that they are not crazy,
 they are not psychotic, they are not mentally ill, they aren't losing
 their minds, and this has the effect of empowering them.  You talk about
 the different ways that people understand this experience, and you
 explore it with them.  One patient left saying that his fear had been
 transformed into curiosity.  If I can do that, then I think I've met my
 therapeutic objective."

  It's not a surprise, of course, that Mack, Laibow, and other
 mental-health professionals championing the anomalous have faced a
 growing barrage of criticism both from colleagues and outsiders.  Are
 these therapists, critics wonder, clinging to the myth of their own
 mental impregnability and being drawn into the abyss by the magnetic
 pull of their patients' experiences?

  "One needs to monitor one's own reaction to what it is that goes on,"
 cautions NIMH psychologist Harold Goldstein.  "You can be sympathetic,
 you can be empathic, you can be understanding, but your goal as a
 therapist is not to leap into the same pit as the patient, but to be
 there to help pull someone out.  I think that when physicians or
 psychologists endorse these things, or appear to endorse them, we do
 real damage to issues of rationality and realistic evidence.  When we
 reach a point that what's true is what people believe, then we've sunk
 to a very dangerous situation.  "

  Bill Ellis, a researcher in contemporary legends at Pennsylvania State
 University in Hazleton applauds mental-health professionals for coming
 to grips with anomalous experiences, but, like Goldstein, thinks a
 little more objectivity is in order.  "I think we forget therapists can
 communicate through body language what they want from their patients,"
 he says.  "It's the clever Hans phenomenon.  It's like the horse that
 could come up with the square root of 360, but what it had really
 learned to do was keep pawing the ground until its trainer relaxed.  The
 trainer was not doing it deliberately.  The trainer was convinced that
 the horse could add and subtract and do square roots. But eventually,
 somebody who was smart enough to figure out what was going on stopped
 watching the horse and started watching the trainer. I think we should
 have more people watching the therapists."

  Doing just that is Robert Baker, a retired professor of psychology who
 taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University
 of Kentucky.  And Baker doesn't like what he sees.  "I hope we can do
 something about this nonsense, because it's getting to the point where
 it's almost a national panic disorder," he says.  "We have to do
 something about therapists who really don't know what they're doing. The
 therapists who commit themselves to this nonsense are not aware of major
 areas of human behavior and just do not understand the way the human
 nervous system works."

  One thing that fools therapists, says Baker, is cryptoamnesia, a
 series of false memories that form a fantasy with a few minor elements
 of truth thrown in.  "The fact is, we do not remember things exactly,"
 he explains.  "We change, arrange, and distort the memories we have
 stored to better serve our needs and desires.  We fill the gaps in
 memory with events that never happened or with events that did not
 happen the way we imagine, and the results can be bizarre."

  The other major cause of the wild stories people tell, according to
 Baker, is sleep paralysis, a sleep disorder accompanied by
 hallucinations that affects about 5 percent of the population.  In sleep
 paralysis, Baker explains, "people wake up in the middle of the night
 and can't move.  They feel like they're wide awake, but they continue
 dreaming and in the dreams often see such things as demons, aliens, or
 ghosts.  Since they're partly awake, however, they may think the dream
 really happened when, in fact, it didn't.  It's no wonder that people
 find this terrifying, and that's what's responsible for the
 posttraumatic stress disorder that therapists are talking about."

  But Baker has no explanation for the wild stories told by the
 therapists themselves, unless, he notes, they're "simply seeking
 attention."  Laibow, for instance, claims to have personally experienced
 anomalous "healing," an event she says cannot be explained by
 conventional medical science.  As Laibow recalls, it was a muggy day in
 August 1991 when she "trucked on down to Brooklyn to an unairconditioned
 high-school auditorium filled with lots of Polish and Russian emigres.
 "She sat for three hours, she says, watching Kiev-based psychiatrist and
 self-proclaimed healer Anatoly Kashperovsky dance to New Age Gypsy music
 and thought, "What's a nice girl like me doing in a place like this?"

  Anyway, there was Laibow, watching Kashperovsky's performance,
 impatient and skeptical and thinking, "This wouldn't work well at the
 AMA," when suddenly," she says, "this Caesarean scar that I had, which
 was thick and ropey and very prominent because I'd gotten an infection
 immediately after the delivery of my son, began to tingle." As soon as
 she could decorously take a peek, she hiked up her skirt and found to
 her surprise that the scar was gone.



 -!- Blue Wave/QBBS v2.12 [NR]
 ! Origin: *** Odyssey Fringe Science Echo *** 1-205-739-1469 (1:3607/20.0)
 * Tossed by SFToss v1.02 on 93/09/01  02:53:30
 ___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.12
  - JetMail v1.14a3 - Unregistered QWK Mail Door for Spitfire

--
Sheldon Wernikoff - via ParaNet node 1:104/422
UUCP: !scicom!paranet!User_Name
INTERNET: [e-mail]

Path: demon!zaphod.axion.bt.co.uk!uknet!pipex!uunet!spool.mu.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!news.bu.edu!att!csn!csn!scicom!paranet!p0.f31.n1012.z9.FIDONET.ORG!Sheldon.Wernikoff
From: [e-mail] (Sheldon Wernikoff)
Newsgroups: alt.paranet.ufo
Subject: Abduction Article, 7/7
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 2 Sep 93 06:44:00 GMT
Sender: [e-mail] (newsout1.26)
Organization: FidoNet node 9:1012/31.0 - ParaNet ALPHA, Lincoln NE
Lines: 44


 * Originally By: John Powell
  * Originally To: All
  * Originally Re: Abduction Article, 7/7
  * Original Area: BAMA UFO (Fido)
  * Forwarded by : Blue Wave v2.12


  She immediately made an appointment with her gynecologist, "the head
 of reproductive medicine at a major university," who, Laibow claims, was
 shocked when all he could find was a very fine hairline scar.  The
 gynecologist, whom she will not name, was excited by her story. "Imagine
 if we could do that," Laibow says he exclaimed.  Laibow adds that the
 gynecologist may be interested in collaborating on a future study of
 healing.  One possible subject: a Japanese healer who Laibow says "seems
 to have some very substantial powers."

  As founder of TREAT and raconteur of stories both marvelous and
 strange, Laibow is controversial to say the least.  But are the doctor
 and her colleagues merely misguided, marrying their fortunes to the
 winds of culture, much like those who touted fairies and dragons in eras
 past?  Or are they onto something new?  Will their quest lead more
 people to come forward with anomalous experiences and encounters,
 providing the data necessary for proper scrutiny - perhaps even
 authentication - by the scientific and medical communities at large?  In
 short, are these mental-health professionals fooling themselves, or are
 they forging extraordinary paths through the byways of consciousness and
 the murky outback of the unknown?  To answer these questions, of course,
 is to know the nature of the unknown, and that is something we humans
 have ceaselessly attempted for thousands of years - so far, with out
 much success.



 -!- Blue Wave/QBBS v2.12 [NR]
 ! Origin: *** Odyssey Fringe Science Echo *** 1-205-739-1469 (1:3607/20.0)
 * Tossed by SFToss v1.02 on 93/09/01  02:53:31
 ___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.12
  - JetMail v1.14a3 - Unregistered QWK Mail Door for Spitfire

--
Sheldon Wernikoff - via ParaNet node 1:104/422
UUCP: !scicom!paranet!User_Name
INTERNET: [e-mail]