Confirmation by Whitley Strieber

Author:Whitley Strieber [Strieber, Whitley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2014-09-18T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

Yes Or No

What can possibly be made of stories like these? Why would normal people be generating such incredibly bizarre tales out of their ordinary memories?

Is it because aliens are here, and aliens—real ones—are just as strange as we thought they would be? Or is it that expectations built up within the culture have led the fantasy-prone to recast ordinary nightmares into hallucinations of alien contact?

Behavioral scientists have offered many theories of why certain people might come to believe that they have had close encounters. Until the Spanos study (discussed in Chapter Eight) and others like it, there were theories that witnesses must be fantasy-prone or boundary-deficit personalities, or persons otherwise marginalized and given to occult interests.[47] Multiple-witness cases were explained as instances of group hallucination induced when a number of fantasy-prone individuals came together.

The terms “fantasy-prone” and “boundary-deficit” both describe individuals “whose ability to distinguish between imagination and reality is diminished relative to a ‘normal’ individual.”[48] Such people have a tendency to alter memories, combine subconscious and hallucinatory events into fantasies, and to experience imaginary events “with the same vividness and emotional impact of reality.”[49]

A 1988 study by Ph.D. student Julie Parnell involved more than two hundred participants in a UFO conference.[50] Two personality tests were administered, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) and either the 16 Personality Factors Test (16PF) or the Adjective Check List (ACL). Like the Spanos study, this one did not find evidence for psychopathology.

In my case, the Bender Gestalt, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale Revised, the House-Tree-Person Test, the Thematic Apperception Test, the Human Figure Drawings Test, and the Rorschach were all administered to me by Dr. Maryellen Duane on March 7, 1986, a few months after my December 1985 close encounter. Among the findings were that I was a bright individual who “appeared to be under a good deal of stress,” was suffering from fatigue, and “appeared to be very frightened and to feel powerless.” She saw “a good deal of inner turmoil” and was concerned that my stressed condition not compromise my ability to separate fantasy from reality.

I did not show any evidence of being a fantasy-prone personality, though, and the general high level of stress and turmoil that I displayed seems consistent with the picture presented by victims of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). “A fantasy origin for PTSD would be a novelty, because all prior experience indicates some external source as the cause,” according to Bullard.[51] But stress disorder also appears to cause a tendency to fantasy, so it is conceivable that alien fantasies could arise as a secondary consequence to explainable stress factors.

In part, the results of my personal tests were what has led me to adhere strictly to the notion that the close encounter experience—especially my own experiences—should remain open to question until there is absolute proof of origin. I continue to stand by that belief, although the physical evidence to be presented in the next section must stand as a possible indication that the time for neutrality is passing.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.