Abduction Digest, Number 48 Tuesday, February 18th 1992 (C) Copyright 1992 Paranet Information Service. All Rights Reserved. Today's Topics: Abductions in the Media Message Re-send Abductions ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Jim.Speiser@f37.n114.z1.FIDONET.ORG (Jim Speiser) Subject: Abductions in the Media Date: 11 Feb 92 03:30:00 GMT Two upcoming media events will highlight the abduction phenomenon, both of them produced by Peabody Award winner Tracy Torme'. The first is the long-awaited mini-series treatment of Budd Hopkins' best-seller "Intruders," which will air on two consecutive nights in May. UFO purists will no doubt decry the fact that it is a fictionalized version, with only one scene taken straight from the book, says Torme'. But, he says, it will be generally good exposure for the subject. It will air on CBS, which is already producing a teaser called "The Making of `Intruders.'" The second and more ambitious project is "Fire in the Sky," about the Travis Walton case. Torme' originally wrote the screenplay three years ago, but as in the case of "Intruders," Hollywood politics has kept it out of production - until now. Tracy has set up shop at Paramount Studios, and shooting begins July 1st. The director is Rob Leiberman, whose credits include TV's "Gabriel's Fire" and the Jon Voigt movie "Table for Five." Tracy has promised to make himself available to ParaNet in the near future to provide more information and to, as he puts it, "quash rumors." Jim Speiser -- Jim Speiser - via ParaNet node 1:104/422 UUCP: !scicom!paranet!User_Name INTERNET: Jim.Speiser@f37.n114.z1.FIDONET.ORG -------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Chris.Lightner@f21.n1010.z9.FIDONET.ORG (Chris Lightner) Subject: Message Re-send Date: 12 Feb 92 00:12:25 GMT Keith, this is a message you may not have received due to the transmission problem reported by Vladimir Godic. Sysop - The Lighthouse BBS / ParaNet Delta-Alpha ********************************************************************* DATE..... : 02-03-92 00:34:52 TO....... : Keith Basterfield FROM..... : David Jacobs SUBJECT.. : Abductions I have recently written in my new book that to the best of my knowledge all abductees have been physically not in place during the abduction. This statement seems rather sweeping but I feel that it is accurate. The Puddy case is interesting but quite obviously the event that you describe is not an abduction. Mrs Puddy might indeed be an abductee (the sightings that she had earlier experienced might be evidence of this) but the incident in the car has all the earmarks of either being a "channeled" episode or a flashback to a previous event, or evidence of mental instability. Whereas on the surface it might appear that this has all the hallmarks of an apparent abduction, in fact the description that she gave of the entity, the entity's movements, the entity's motivations, and so forth, would be immediately suspicious to me. Her description of the inside of a UFO might well have been picked up either from a previous abduction or from some outside conventional source. The only way that one can find out these things with a reasonable degree of assurance is by doing hypnosis with somebody who thoroughly understands the abduction phenomenon so that the hypnotist and/or researcher can tell when she veers off what is presently known about abductions. I hope that my book will help in that endeavor. All of this goes back to the problem that Jim Speiser brought up about what is to be believed in conscious recollections of unusual events. People will confabulate, they will remember things wrongly, they will unconsciously elaborate and add material, they will slip into "channeling," and they will exhibit evidence of mental abberations. Separating the wheat from the chaff is a difficult task. But the most important thing to understand is that there is wheat. Dwelling on the chaff is like spending all of one's time ruminating about UFO sightings that are identified! It was the sightings that could not be identified that brought us all here. It is true that we only have a few cases of uninvolved bystanders witnessing an abduction of another person. This situation is involved with the technology employed for carrying out the abduction. Budd Hopkins is at present working on a sensational case that does include bystanders witnessing the abduction. He will probably write a book about it and it will go a very long way towards putting this controversy to rest. The IUR will also publish an article of mine addressing the issue. Budd and I have many cases in which people witness others being abducted and are not abducted themselves. They are often "switched off" so that they can do nothing about it and their accounts are usually, but not always, recovered with the use of hypnosis. We also have many cases in which several people are abducted at once and they can independently confirm their experiences without knowing that their fellow abductees have also remembered the event. Incidentally, Jenny Randles talks about the Sunderland case but makes no reference to her mother seeing her in bed during a supposed abduction. Keep up the good work! ********************************************************************* Via SPITFIRE Bulletin Board System - Version 3.1 -- Chris Lightner - via ParaNet node 1:104/422 UUCP: !scicom!paranet!User_Name INTERNET: Chris.Lightner@f21.n1010.z9.FIDONET.ORG -------------------------------------------------------------------- From: David.Jacobs@f21.n1010.z9.FIDONET.ORG (David Jacobs) Subject: Abductions Date: 12 Feb 92 07:02:28 GMT Sheldon, I think that one of the problems here is one of definition. My definition of an abduction may be very different than your's or Keith Basterfield's or others who have perhaps not been as steeped in the subject as Budd Hopkins or I. When I talk of abductions, I am presupposing that the abductee has had a physical event occur to him which involves loss of time, physical displacement, mental and/or physical sequelae, and a series of defined procedures administered to him during the event. When people claim to be abducted and are not, for example mentally unstable individuals, or channelers, they do not fit the definition of being an abductee. They do not have a loss of time that they nor anyone else can account for, they are always physically in place during the supposed event, they do not have the mental and physical sequelae that is evidence for their event, they can not correctly identify the procedures that nearly all abductees discuss (this, unfortunately, will change when my book comes out). Therefore they most likely have not had abduction experiences regardless of what they claim and it is a mistake to label these people as abductees. When people contact me to investigate their experiences, I try to screen them as carefully as I can. I ask a series a indirect questions that helps me to ascertain whether the unusual events in their lives are related to my field or not. For those people who I think are not abductees, I tell them that their experiences reside in an area that I do not have the expertise to help them in. Therefore the people who come to me have a high possibility of being actual abductees or, to be more precise, of fitting the profile that is my definition of abductee. Now it is obviously a little more complicated than that. I routinely reject people who might very well be abductees but who also have mental problems with which I will not be able to contend. I sometimes reject people who might very well be abductees because they are so encased in a New Age structure that it is very difficult to break through it to find out what is happening. I reject people who are going through a traumatic situation in their lives--divorce, death in family, and so forth--because I think that beginning to explore these experiences might be more than they can deal with at this particular time. I recommend against exploring these experiences if a person is enjoying a happy, fulfilling life with no serious problems (as far as I can tell) who just want to find out on a lark what is happening with them. I do not deal with children directly. As you will soon see, my book does not address all these issues but it does try to address the internal generation of abduction accounts and show how they cannot account for the evidence as presented by actual abductees. The book is not a heavy-duty attempt to convince people of the legitimacy of the subject, rather it is an effort to define the parameters of it and to show that the idea of internal generation of the accounts is greatly lacking as an explanatory model. Via SPITFIRE Bulletin Board System - Version 3.1 -- David Jacobs - via ParaNet node 1:104/422 UUCP: !scicom!paranet!User_Name INTERNET: David.Jacobs@f21.n1010.z9.FIDONET.ORG ******************************************************************************** For permission to reproduce or redistribute this digest, contact: DOMAIN Michael.Corbin@paranet.org UUCP scicom!paranet.org!Michael.Corbin ****************A**B**D**U**C**T**I**O**N****D**I**G**E**S**T******************* Submissions UUCP {ncar,isis,csn}!scicom!abduct Submissions DOMAIN abduct@scicom.alphacdc.com Admin Address abduct-request@shemtaia.weeg.uiowa.edu Mail to private Paranet/Fidonet addresses from the newsletters: DOMAIN firstname.lastname@paranet.org UUCP scicom!paranet.org!firstname.lastname ****************A**B**D**U**C**T**I**O**N****D**I**G**E**S**T*******************