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Originally Posted by Rausch
To me the Betty and Barney Hill case seems the most valid.
For them to make this up only hurts them both, draws attention to their mixed marriage (at a bad time,) and there WAS physical evidence taken.
They fought with investigators and even the psychiatrist about what should or shouldn't be reported.
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Yeah, that's something most people don't realize about that case, that details about it were never supposed to be made public.
However, it's a case where regression was used, which makes me question the details. Not that something happened to them, just that what was uncovered under hypnosis was what really occurred. Regression is not reliable. Even Dr. Simon (the doctor who did the hypnosis) admitted, as I recall, that he thought the memories he recovered were manipulated and that he wasn't sure what the reality of the event was.
It's definitely interesting though. The things that were recovered independently from each of them matched the other's story. It's unlikely that they worked together to make up those stories, since (again as I recall) they were each given amnesia after each session and were not privy to each other's story until years later.
That case is pretty strong evidence to me that there's some kind of third party interference going on, and that that third party has the ability to effectively screen memories in the human mind. Plenty of evidence of that elsewhere throughout the abduction phenomenon as well.
Odd thing about the abduction phenomena these days is that, at least from the outside, it doesn't look like there's as much of it going on. Although maybe that's just perception. It sure seemed like it was a bigger deal in the 80s and 90s than it is today, though.
This is going to sound strange, but sometimes I wonder how much influence the x-files actually had on social consciousness of the paranormal in my lifetime (I know it certainly fed into my interest, although I was into this stuff before 1993...), and things like aliens became trendy on a larger scale because of that show, and how much things seem to have fallen off since it ended. Similar to how much influence I think the "ghost" shows that currently plague television are having on that branch of paranormal study.
Point I'm sort of roundabout getting to is I wonder if the abduction phenomenon is something that has always gone on, but our interpretation of it changes based on culture at the time. Like in the middle ages it was attributed to sprites or the fae or to demons, and from the 60s to today it would have been aliens because that's what developed into popular culture post WW2.
Which is not to say that it might not be ETs, and that they could have been masquerading/masking memory in earlier points in history as whatever was popular culture at the time. But it also raises the possibility that this third party, whatever it is, can effectively change whatever our perception of it is, and maybe it isn't ET, either.