Aliens and Ghosts.. (1 Viewer)

[Will_B]

That's a question everyone should be asking themselves.

 

[Jeff Gatie]

Thanks for relegating my experiences, which I have studied in order to understand them, to the scrap pile of "distortion".

 

[Will_B]

McNally worked up the street from me. Met him a few times and his partner Clancy, who teamed up to disprove memories of childhood sexual abuse by studying people whose experiences they knew in advance to be false - people who'd described alien encounters. They knew this in advance because McNally had met with John Mack about the alien subject a few years earlier, and decided it was false.

My favorite quote of McNally's is "I had no idea what he was talking about," in reference to John Mack's suggestion that Western concepts of reality are too restrictive for an understanding of the alien encounter phenomenon. (I'm quoting the following website there). You can hear the entire BBC broadcast here:
http://tinyurl.com/nafh2

Regarding your quote about statistics of sleep paralysis, I've never suggested that sleep paralysis and the accompanying hallucinations were not a real phenomenon. Fun trivia: It occurs less often if you sleep on your stomach.

 

[Will_B]

I'm going to try not to reply for awhile, as I think this we're starting to bicker - and we're both resorting to pulling out experts to restate what we've each already said ourselves.

 

[Jeff Gatie]

Oh Will, I'll simply echo your statement of "unbelievable" and add to it to say that if confronted with New Age ..... uhhhh ..... (Should I say it??? Hmmm, should I? ... Ayup!) **bullshit** like "Western concepts of reality are too restrictive for an understanding of the alien encounter phenomenon", I'd have reacted with the same "I had no idea what he was talking about" statement. If we are recusing western scientific thought for some artsy fartsy chakra stones and crystal viewing reality, then our conversation is done.


No offense Will, but I know they worked in Cambridge (specifically Harvard) and being I'm a resident of Massachusetts and a product of Massachusetts public schools and Colleges and thus understand the culture of the little town affectionately know as "the people's republic", this really explains a lot.

 

[Chu Gai]

John Mack, a former professor at Harvard, has crossed over. He may now be reached through John Edwards, Sylvia Browne, Char Margolis.

 

[Todd H]

I've had sleep paralysis a number of times and have seen everything from aliens to monsters to arms coming through my window to grab me. The first few times scared the hell out of me because I tried to scream but couldn't make a sound. Later after I learned what sleep paralysis was it didn't bother me any longer. When it happened I pretty much told myself it wasn't real and sure enough the weird apparitions disappeared. The mind is an amazing thing isn't it?

 

[Chu Gai]

Over at http://atheism.about.com/gi/pages/po...ll_sci0002.htm I saw a rather unscientific poll about alien abductions. About 30% of the people think the reports are credible and that it's happened. Sounds reasonable when you consider about the same amount of people believe the US government engineered 9/11. OK, if the US population is about 300 million, that means that there's about 90 million who are of this opinion. Now, if as Jeff has noted, that 30% of the population has experienced sleep paralysis, then that means that 27 million people have experienced it. Now, if 5% also have the hypnotic hallucinations, then that means about 1.4 million people have had this happen to them. Now the sleep paralysis varies from severe to mild. If only 1% (I'm just guessing here) of the people had the worst possible scenario imagninable, then you've got 14,000 people just in the US who really believe they might've been abducted and probed by aliens.

Some interesting stuff, like a technical report by some researchers can be found at http://watarts.uwaterloo.ca/~acheyne...Techreport.pdf while at http://watarts.uwaterloo.ca/~acheyne/S_P.html you can read some additional material and even participate in their online survey.

 

[Jeff Gatie]

I've found out more about my own sleep paralysis just from research for this thread, so at least I learned something. It is said that shift workers have more frequent and more intense episodes. I worked night shift and swing shift when I was younger and for the past 8 years I've been woken up for work at all hours of the night, so I'm a big "check" on that one. Since I'm on call for IT 24/7/365, I have been conditioned to wake up really quickly and to have an alert mind as soon as possible after waking, so that may be a factor. It is also said to happen more often to those who suffer from sleep apnea, which I've not been diagnosed with, but my father was diagnosed as a sufferer and there seems to be a genetic factor in both.

I'm not worried, though. It is not really a problem for me anymore since I know what it is and like H, I sometimes find it kind of cool.

 

[Todd H]

I was working the 7 PM to 7 AM shift at a local factory while in college and that was when I experienced sleep paralysis the most. Between work and school my sleeping habits were terrible. I haven't had an episode in a few years though, since my sleep patterns are normal now.

 

[Joe Szott]

Hmmm, that's interesting stuff. I'd never heard of sleep paralysis and had not (really) experienced it myself.

Oddly enough though I get the opposite effect fairly often: coming out of paralysis while still stone asleep (or should I just say sleepwalking?) I can't tell you how many times I've either fallen out of bed or slammed my hand into the nightstand in the middle of a dream.

I sleep on my stomach almost exclusively, could this be the link? Or is my mind training me to be an alien hunter-killer? You know, if they ever come to shove a satellite dish up my sleeping butt, I can break the paralysis and Tom Cruise their woefully unimmune selves.