Oct 10 2008
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ET Abductions
Mac Tonnies says:
“I’ve been reading Alien Abductions: Creating a Modern Phenomenon by Terry Matheson. Resolutely skeptical (Matheson’s book was published by Prometheus, the publishing arm of the Center for Scientific Inquiry), Alien Abductions takes on a subject almost as portentous as the purported phenomenon itself: the role of narrative technique used to convey the ever-evolving ‘truth’ behind abduction accounts.
“Unlike many would-be debunkers, Matheson’s book reveals an astute familiarity with the principal texts (John Fuller’s The Interrupted Journey, Raymond Fowler’s books on Betty Andreasson, etc.) Matheson raises valid points about the way popular authors present strange memes to an astonished (if often credulous) readership. In so doing, he sounds a scholarly alarm that writers of the paranormal ignore at their peril.”
And Mac has much more to say, too.
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October 11th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
The narrative fantasy. Knowing the problem is half the solution. I doubt that Prometheus would be able to catch its tail on this one — as the Dragon turns into the Disc. For example I was reading William Calvin’s amazing Neil’s Brain book a couple weeks ago. Calvin was detailing the specific part of the brain (I think part of the left temporal lobe) used for remembering names. For some reason I found myself trying to remember the name of Prometheus books! I knew it was some Greek god-type name and I knew it started with a “P” — Pericles? no. Pantheon? no.
Oh yeah the reason I tried to remember Prometheus was because Calvin pointed out that for a short-term memory to become a long-term memory it most trigger a certain intensity of experience. So for things not important to us our brains consciously ignore the short-term memory, thereby storing it deeper into the subconscious then a typical long-term conscious memory. Or so I posed as I used Prometheus as a test case. I justified my inability to remember that publisher’s name with my conscious decision not to remember it since I almost always dismiss a book after seeing it’s published by Prometheus. But still I wanted to remember the name so I tried focusing my brain on that lower left temporal lobe area (or maybe it was the right parietal upper area?). Anyway the point is I was using my left-brain to carry out this operation when anyone knows, from experience, that the best way to remember something is to consciously let it go, thereby letting the subconscious right-brain retrieve the information. Then usually the next morning after a good nights sleep the answer will pop into the left brain out of nowhere. And so it happened the next morning: Promethus books.
Narrative fantasy. My real point in the above rant is that left-brain dominance IS the alien abduction — prose, polemic, deduction, etc. Edgar Allen Poe figured this out and called pure logical inference: “beyond genius.” So the modern human struggles with left-brain dominance not meeting the emotional balance that the right-brain provides and therefore the left-brain is subconsciously controlled by the cerebellum (the reptilian) brain, bringing with it subconscious fears: The alien abduction. Stan Gooch’s book, recently reissued, on alien abductions and other paranormal phenomenon is spot-on.