Abduction stories starting in the early ’60's talked about the big head oval shaped eye creatures including the hearing of buzzing and mechanical sound at the time of the incident. This is not a product of watching Close Encounters, or ET, the most popular case, Betty and Barney Hill occurred more than a decade before these movies were released! So why won’t the skeptics go after the Hill story? Because there is a conscience, direct physical craft sighting before the abduction took place. Gee, “Sleep Paralysis” can’t explain that one. You know it amazes me how certain doctors can fully explain the functions of the brain when we can’t explain how we fully retain images. The brain is still one of the most intriguing unresolved mysterious of science. Well except to the Skeptics, they know it all.
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So why won’t the skeptics go after the Hill story?
They have. There was a very good debunking in Skeptical Inquirer magazine a while back. Apparently the Hills were driving along and kept seeing a bright light in the sky. They kept watching it as they drove, and eventually got home and realized they were home hours later they expected to be (missing time).
The reality was that the bright light they saw in the sky was most likely Venus, and the reason they had "missing time" was because they were driving so slowly watching the light in the sky, even stopping a time or two. So of course you're going to get home later than you expect. It wasn't until later under hypnotic suggestion that they started inventing the alien abduction story.
@ Doubting Thomas: checking back to the original story is always a good idea in such cases. The Bernadette Soubirous (she of Lourdes) case is another where the story as first reported bears very little relation to the textus receptus. Also, the very first sighting of the 'Loch Ness Monster', as first reported, involved Mrs Donaldina Mackay seeing something out of the corner of her eye that looked like 'two wild ducks fighting' as she was driven past the loch. (Really: that's what the whole myth sprang from). Her story got changed a bit in subsequent re-tellings.
@ farpadokly: Bollocks. Nobody has ever traced any of the supposed sightings before Mrs Mackay's in 1933. St Columba is supposed (in the Life of Columba by Adomnan, written a century after Columba's death, not that it matters) to have admonished a beast that was ravening about upsetting fishermen ... but that was in the River Ness, 10 miles, a stretch of river and another loch away from Loch Ness.
No, us skeptics don't know, or claim to know, it all, we can just see the odds and can often detect scams and bullsh*t. Too bad about you.
I don't even think the Hills were lying.
Like Doubting Thomas and Bossman said, they had "missing time" because they were staring at "that weird light in the sky" (otherwise known as Venus) instead of driving home, and they had recently seen an early depiction of what would become "the Greys" on TV. That means their minds were well primed to fabricate their "alien-abduction" experience when they underwent hypnosis. "Hypnotherapy" is known to make people unwittingly compile all kinds of random, unconnected things together into false memories and other crazy-ass shit, like "I saw a creepy thing on TV" + "I saw a funny light in the sky" = "I was abducted by the Greys."
The Hills are victims of pseudo-scientific quackpottery. After listening to their hypnosis tapes, I can't imagine how horrifying and traumatizing it must have been for them to sincerely believe that happened to them.
The Thing from another World (1951) Alien had a huge hear and dark rings around its eyes.
The Man From Planet X had a bulbous head, but beady eyes.
Invaders from Mars (1953), the creatures had big eyes, except for their leader who had, guess what, a giant head.
This Island Earth (1955), The people of planet Metaluna are distinguished by their large brain pans. Later a "mutant" is seen with an enormous brain and large, goggle like eyes.
Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957) had big heads and big oval shaped eyes with slit pupils.
The big heads and eyes model was already well used by the late 50's
@Leighton Buzzard
It's always amazing how the story changes later, after many retellings and passed from person to person by UFO believers. If you go back to the very first, original telling by the Hills, it's pretty mundane. But if you search for the story on the internet now, there are so many different details added that it's nothing like the original story.
Well at least I have you discussing the abduction phenomenon, and that's always a plus. As for the Hills watching Venus, their missing time would have to more than double to account for the light movement they encountered if it was a planet. But how about the Zeta star system? Under hypnosis Betty described a star system that wasn't catalouged at that time yet. Thoughts?
Zukowski: "Their missing time would have to more than double to account for the light movement..."
That makes very little sense. Furthermore, have you ever ridden in a car & watched the stars? They seem to move & jostle around quite a bit. Under hypnotic suggestion, that can easily become "the light was moving around like a spaceship."
The rest of your argument has been taken apart, as well, yet you haven't said anything about it.
@Zukowski
And the Zeta thing was merely a suggestion by a UFOlogist, and shaping the report of the "star map" to the existing stars in the area around the Solar System isn't the best way to corroborate evidence (starting at Zeta Reticulli and working backwards from there),
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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