The study I am going to analyze today is called “Explaining ‘Memories’ of Space Alien Abduction and Past Lives: An Experimental Psychopathology Approach”. It was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychopathology in 2012. The author is Richard J. McNally, of Harvard University. If you want to read it entirely, you only have to click on the article’s title, though I can summarize it for you in a few words: it is beyond repair. When I finished reading it, I wasn’t sure if the only purpose of this “scientist” was mocking all the people who claim to have been abducted by aliens or remember past lives —because it is obvious both phenomena are totally comparable (???)— or maybe make it very clear to his colleagues that he doesn’t believe in such things typical of nutters.
But well, let’s go step by step, as there is a lot of hay to mow here.
The first thing that calls one’s attention is, as I mentioned before, the word “memories” put between quotation marks. You suspect from the beginning that if it goes between quotation marks, it is because the article’s author doesn’t consider they are real memories. They have to be another thing. Why? Man, it is clear, everybody knows that neither extraterrestrials nor reincarnation exist, so they have to be necessarily false. It seems incredible to me that then, a bit further on, he gets surprised when he is called a “close-minded skeptic”.
I have to say that I don’t understand why the part of the abductions seems more elaborated than the part of the past lives, though I can suspect the reason: because, sadly, the phenomenon of the alleged abductees has been more studied than the alleged reincarnated people, even within parapsychology. I don’t know if this is good or bad. It may be because we have been disregarded, or it may be because we are considered even madder than the abductees. In any case, in the article, much of what they say about abductees seems to be applicable as well to those who remember past lives (this is to say, they used the same deplorable methods of study), though in the final section it becomes obvious that their ignorance in regards to people who claim to remember past lives is incommensurable. This troubles me greatly.
ABSTRACT: In this article, I describe how my colleagues, students, and I have used the methods of experimental psychopathology to explain why seemingly sincere, nonpsychotic people claim to have memories of being abducted by space aliens or memories from past lives. Our group has used experimental methods from cognitive psychology and psychophysiology, supplementing them with clinical interviews and psychometric tests, to elucidate the psychology of these two groups. Our data point to quasi-spiritual motivations for why some people embrace the identity of alien abductee or past lifer.
The purpose of this article is to provide an account of how we wound up studying such strange topics in the laboratory, and to summarize what we have learned about these two “false memory syndromes.”
A false memory is the psychological phenomenon in which a person recalls something that did not occur. False memory is often considered in legal cases regarding childhood sexual abuse. This phenomenon was initially investigated by psychological pioneers Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud. Freud wrote The Aetiology of Hysteria, where he discussed repressed memories of childhood sexual trauma in their relation to hysteria. Elizabeth Loftus has, since her debuting research project in 1974, been a lead researcher in memory recovery and false memories. False memory syndrome recognizes false memory as a prevalent part of one's life in which it affects the person's mentality and day-to-day life. False memory syndrome differs from false memory in that the syndrome is heavily influential in the orientation of a person's life, while false memory can occur without this significant effect. The syndrome takes effect because the person believes the influential memory to be true. However, its research is controversial and the syndrome is excluded from identification as a mental disorder and, therefore, is also excluded from the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders". False memory is an important part of psychological research because of the ties it has to a large number of mental disorders, such as PTSD.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory
Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus asserts that it is possible to induce and create false memories, in an autogenous way, through several proceedings, in which the persons create their memories with the information they retain from their past, their general knowledge and social demands, and that techniques like hypnosis, rebirthing and "recovered-memory therapy", among others, can induce the formation of false memories. According to this author, these techniques can lead an individual to believe that fantasies and facts that never occurred are real. She suggests that some false memories are formed through "rehearsal" or repetitions of an event that was confirmed as fantastic.
Translated from https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsos_recuerdos.
How is it that they wound up studying abductees and people who remember past lives? Well, almost by accident, which, as everybody knows, is the best way to plan a serious scientific study. It turns out that they were studying people with PTSD, war veterans as well as women who had suffered sexual abuse in their childhood. Then a few subjects turned up that claimed they didn’t remember anything traumatic in their childhood but had unusual symptoms that might be related to a trauma. As a consequence, the author got interested in repressed memories of possible sexual abuse victims. In several experiments they observed that women with repressed memories that could be recovered later, were more prone to create false memories than those who had not forgotten the abuse. The problem is they didn’t have a way to know whether those recovered memories were false or not. So, to study the mechanism that could be involved in the creation of false memories, they decided to resort to people who claimed to be abducted, because, obviously, in this case memories are indeed false and there can’t be a doubt about it. Now, they “made sure” the volunteers were not pranksters, but people who was really convinced of having been abducted. They were paid, but only a little, to make sure that the economic incentive wasn’t enticing enough to go through all the tests without being a real abductee. It seems they did the same with the people who claimed to remember past lives... and how curious, among these latter there was indeed a woman who admitted to be a fake. It seems that those of us who remember past lives are less reliable than abductees (???).
Seriously, the previous paragraph is so surrealistic that I have no words left. But yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is how “scientific studies” related to the paranormal are done today. The really lamentable thing is these studies get published and, besides, we have to believe their conclusions...
Part 2.