Extraordinary Claims

I may, with with one general line of inquiry. Our present understanding of the evolution of of life on Earth is that it's a slow process of evolution by natural selection. The human beings are the product of several billions of years of random mutation accidental effects leading up to what we are now. Other planets certainly have environments quite different from those on the Earth, and therefore we would expect it beings that evolved there would have even greater differences,

and that would not look closely like human beings. And that's why I was interested to see that the characterization of the inhabitants of the supposed extraterrestrial space vehicle where we're a few minor difference, is very closely human. Head, two eyes, smell like a nose, mouth, hands, feet, and so on. This seemed to me that much more likely that this was putting projecting human experience onto perhaps something else.

I think the thing that strikes me most is the fact that not only did these creatures breathe the Earth's atmosphere with no difficulty, but you were able to breathe the spacecraft's atmosphere with no difficulty. Is that a question, No, it's our common Well, that's all I can say is did you notice any respirators or anything of that? Not my position, um certain out of psychologists, but some aspects of the story that Mrs Hill told, particularly the needle incident,

seemed to me recognizable having read Freud. I discussed it with Betty herself too, and that Betty is as a qualified state social worker, is aware of the dream symbolism and that sort of thing. Oh man, I had something said something that I've discovered sense the hypnosis, And I don't know is this would apply to it, doubts, But in hospitals, when it's necessary to obtain a blood sample from a small infant, it is done through the navel.

I think that you might uh correct me, and this is wrong at least point out the one fact that you said it was a very large needle, larger than anything that you had ever seen before long that it had been plunged into your navel. I can't say that it was plunged in. What it was that they started to insert it and I had pain, and I was under the impression they stopped, But there was no blood

or physical evidence of puncture. I wasn't aware of this until nineteen Well, whenever it happened, if it did happen, you didn't detect any wound on your body. That's Carl Sagan expressing his skepticism to Betty and Barney Hill on The David Schomberg Show in nineteen seven. I think a skeptical mindset has to be brought to bear on any claims regarding UFOs, and quite frankly, the UFO proponents that I spoke with for this podcast expressed the same opinion.

But there's significant disagreement on what exactly constitutes evidence in this context and at what point you can conclude that abductions are happening. Carl Sagan asserted that extraordinary evidence of extraterrestrial visitation was required. A half century after the Hill experience kicked off a succession of abduction accounts. What is the state of the evidence. I'm Toby Ball and This

Is Strange Arrivals Episode eleven, Extraordinary Claims. In the nineteen eighties and nineties, interest in UFO abductions peaked partly because of the work of Bud Hopkins, John mac and David Jacobs, and partly because the concept had been adopted by popular culture, most notably in the X Files and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. However, it was all fueled by the sheer number of people who truly believe that they've been abducted.

UFO researcher Alajandro Rojas there are, and I don't think the general public realizes this, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people that report these experiences, that believe they're having interactions or abductions with aliens. And some of these people are very credible lawyers, police, people in the military. That I think makes it very significant. During this time, there was a change in the standard abduction story.

Instead of driving lonely roads at night, the abductee would be in bed asleep and it would be pulled from their bedroom up to a craft where they'd be subjected to examination and experimentation. The new narrative was consistent with the medically recognized condition known as sleep paralysis. Skeptoid host Brian Dunning. Sleep paralysis is when you wake up, Usually it's shortly after you've fallen asleep or shortly before you

wake up. You're conscious, but you're unable to move, and you see you often see some sort of an entity there in the room with you, and that entity often sits on you or pushes down on you, and you feel a weight on your chest holding you down and you can't move. That's a classic case of sleep paralysis. It's a very thoroughly documented actual phenomenon. This is not new. Samuel Johnson defined the conditions of sleep paralysis as a quote unquote nightmare in his Dictionary of the English Language

in seventeen fifty five. The term nightmare eventually evolved to today's meaning of a bad dream. Now where the Betty and Barney Hill story comes into it and impacts the history of sleep paralysis is what character people have seen sitting on their chest during these episodes prior to this, Prior to the nineteen sixties, in Western society, it was always the old hag. That's where we get the turn

feeling haggard from. You feel Haggard today because you were up last night, because the old hag was writing you around like a donkey. People would wake up and they would see this hag a crone which type character sitting on them, are standing over them. After the Betty and Barney Hills story changed and this idea of the gray alien entered sort of the pop consciousness, suddenly we had alien abductions. People would wake up reporting gray aliens in

their bedroom. Thees I think was when this really peaked. University of California, Irvine professor Elizabeth loftis sleep paralysis. It's very scary if you don't know what it is, and they end up, you know, in the hands of somebody like Hopkins or John Mack who manages to convince them that this is a sign that they were abducted and

that's what they need to deal with. And through suggestive interventions, interviewing, hypnosis, whatever, they helped these patients clients, whatever they are, conjure up images that then feel as if memories. Even among supporters of the idea that UFO abductions are occurring, there is an acknowledgement that at least some reported abductions are the

result of sleep paralysis. It's a fascinating topic, and Betty and Barney Hill story had a huge impact steering the history of sleep paralysis in the United States, which I think is just marvelous. Belief that aliens have visited the Earth remained strong in the US. In twenty century Fox Home Entertainment commissioned to survey regarding UFOs and aliens. It found that almost thirty nine percent of Americans believed that aliens have visited the Earth. An eighteen percent believe that

aliens do abduct people. But despite this, alien abductions seemed to have slipped from the public consciousness in recent years. Author Terry Matheson, I remember you could go through a supermarket checkout line without seeing at least one tabloid with a picture of an alien on the front cover and a news story about somebody who has been abducted by aliens. Now, I can't remember the last time I saw anything like that.

It seems to have just dropped off the radar. As I've mentioned earlier in this series, I think this is largely due to the escalation in the scope and strangeness of abduction stories. When you are constantly one upping the previous story. There comes a point at which the narrative becomes so incredible that it can't plausibly be made more extreme. There is a limit, and for abductions that limit seemed to be hit during the Hopkins era. Matheson has a

similar take. It relies on the book Morphology of the Folk Tale by Vladimir Prop, which looked at how folk tales are structured. Prop argue that there are only certain of that can follow from a previous event. Take a fairy tale, for example, Cinderella's mother dies. Okay, what's going to happen? There are two possibilities. The father will marry again, or he won't. Then he marries again. The stepmother will be good and loving or hard and ruthless. Well, it

makes a better story if she's the latter. And he went on and on showing how there are certain developments in every story, that the story is limited by the number of things you can profitably put into as a subsequent event. And I think that gets us back to this whole thing about what happened to the abduction mess. The myths ran out of things to add on that would be believable. The alien abduction has receded from the public consciousness. That doesn't mean that research on the phenomenon

has ceased. After the break, strange arrivals will return in a moment. Meant you might remember the name Dr Don Dndree. We heard about him much earlier in the series. He was one of the authors, along with Bud Hopkins, of a paper about alien symbols. He's a retired associate professor at McGill University and he's active in the field of UFO investigation. I spoke with him because I wanted to find out what is currently happening in the field of

abduction research. He struck me as a little like Bud Hopkins and his beliefs, but far more measured and with a significant background in science. Dr Dondrey has boiled his theories into three simple propositions about alien abduction. The first proposition is some of of people report as UFOs are extra terrestrial vehicles, they actually are from somewhere else. Proposition to some of those vehicles have et crews what in

popular languages called aliens or extraterrestrials. And point three, some of those crews catch and release people to study us. That's commonly called an alien abduction. I think all of those three propositions are true, but notice that each of them has a sum in it, so not every account is true. But some of what people report as UFOs are ET vehicles. Some ET vehicles, not all of them, have ET crews, and some of those ET crews, to

put it in plain language, mess around with us. They grab people, bring them aboard, do examinations and other things, and put us back. So that's the story. That's what I think is happening. I wondered why, as a scientist, let him to assert these propositions, given the lack of physical evidence of abductions, what could you point to as evidence that these events were actually taking place. There are many reports like this goes back many years, and those

reports have basically been classified, studied, and documented. Many of them are military people. Many of them are people in positions of public authority like cops ore CNP officers in Canada, military people in the United States, many of them accompanied by videos and radar plots. So the evidence is cumulatively overwhelming.

There's no lack of evidence that is both instrumental. That is, people are not just saying something, but they're showing you a video showing you a radar plot showing you, and this is acceptable, a drawing that they made from memory right away. A scientist or a naturalist goes about his or her work exactly the way I'm describing. You go out into nature, you look at something, you write it down, you take a picture of it, a video of it,

you catch it. Or in the case of science, you set up an experiment in which you control some conditions and you see what happens. They abduct people from their houses, from their cars, They test them, they examine them, they put them back. That is, from my point of view known. What their motives are is unknown. That they mess with us is known, and that's not good. During our conversation,

Dondree asserted that he believed that abductions were happening. He did not venture a guess about the number of abductions that might be occurring, though I asked. He also didn't put forth any particular cases as being exemplary, though he has written about many cases. His message to me was simply this abductions are happening to be transparent. I don't

believe they are. And this has nothing to do with Dr Dondree, who is smart, sane and very gracious when talking to a person with much less knowledge of the field and an admittedly skeptical outlook. Instead, it might have to do with the way that I'm wired. Let's go back to the very beginning of the podcast. I talked about the lights that a group of us saw across the expanse of a New Hampshire lake. Two of us

concluded that they were alien spacecraft. The other two, myself included, conceded that we couldn't identify what the lights were, but we were sure they had nothing to do with aliens. Why is it that in the face of identical experiences we would draw such different conclusions. Is it down to psychology? I asked the University of New Hampshire's Mark Ken about this. There have been a few neat experimental analyzes that are showing some reliable differences that are intriguing, like, for instance,

a memory test where we give people a list of words. Say, for instance, the words might be pillow, blanket, night moon. The one thing that's not in the list is the word sleep, but everything around that list talks about sleep. Or we could do the same thing with everything around the world word music, or everything around the word suite. If you give people these lists to memorize, both skeptics and believers will come up with the same number of words right that we're on the list, so we have

very similar memories there. But the believers will also tend to remember the words that were not on the list, the target word that was not there, more than skeptics do. Not only does the believer group remember a word that wasn't on the list, but that word that they falsely remember is the explanation that pulls together the other words

into an understandable whole. Next, he talked about an older study that examined how believers and skeptics reported observing paranormal activities about a century ago, when psychology was getting started and the spiritualism movement was getting started. So it's not UFOs, but this is seances. You could experimentally set up a seance such that you knew because you set it up, that this thing was going to move by itself as you had your hands held around the table and we're

talking to the dead people. Now, the question was with the believers reports seeing the things that actually happened, but also other things that didn't, and what skeptics actually declined to report the seemingly supernatural things that they saw. It turned out that for those experiments, again it was the believers who were more likely to see things and report things that didn't happen. The skeptics actually did, on average,

tend to report the unexplainable things that did happen. Finally, he talked about how preconceived ideas are very difficult to change. This study he describes involves medical students. Some of the students believe in Darwinian evolution and some in Lamarchian evolution. I had to read up on what the difference was for our purposes. You just need to know that these are two different theories on how traits are passed down through generations. Darwin's theory has turned out to be the

scientifically valid one. Lamarck has been disproven. Medical students should definitely understand this and see evidence of it during their studies. Hence, says of the students they tested them going into medical school on their belief system and regarding evolution, and they're specifically looking at beliefs that are Lamarchian versus beliefs that

are Darwinian. Then they're going through medical school where they are using by oology on a regular basis, and they're learning all these different things and they measure them coming out of med school and the people who came in with Lamarckian beliefs left with Lamarchian beliefs. So for the Lamarchian students, despite a period of study during which their views on evolution are demonstrated to be wrong, they still

persist in their beliefs. Even when we get information that disconfirms our beliefs, we tend to process it in a way that doesn't challenge those beliefs. We get this new information and we put it in the same old boxes. We put it in the same cubbyholes. It takes a lot for us to build a new cubbyhole to put things into. This dynamic cuts both ways. Of course, it can be hard to shake believers from their beliefs, But from the believer point of view, the same can be

said of skeptics. And that's a common criticism that abduction proponents level at scientists. They aren't willing or aren't able to expand their notion of what could be real. Dr Don Dondry. If you take a giant ship out to Tierragui ol Fuego, which is the south end of South America and you and your big wooden ship from Europe go exploring. The natives don't even pay attention to the ship.

What they pay attention to is these little robots that come out from the ship, because they've never seen a rowboat, but they have these little rafts, so the robot for them is an improvement on the raft. They can imagine that the ship is something out of their imagination. They don't even pay attention to it. So science, in quotes, doesn't pay attention to what science has no clue at understanding. That goes for point nine percent of all the professional

scientists employed in say the US and Canada. It's basically a forbidden topic because it doesn't fit in science. The facts don't fit in science. There's no theory connecting those facts with what else we knew, and so scientists shrug their shoulders, let the craziest deal with it. That's it. There is no science. I can understand the frustration. It's not just that the scientific world is dismissive of this work, but that doing scientific work on this topic is very difficult.

Simply put, there's essentially no money to fund the research. There isn't a major government grants program to which someone interested in investigating the reality of alien abductions can apply for funding. But here's the thing. It's been almost fifty years since the Hill abduction, and to my knowledge, there's no single piece of physical evidence that you can point to and say, look, this proves that an abduction occurred. There's nothing that's been found that would seem to warrant

a government's funding of research into abductions. Yet despite this lack of evidence, there remains the public perception that extraterrestrials are visiting US. I talked with Kendrick Fraser, who is the founder of the magazine Skeptical Enquirer, the magazine for Science and Reason. I asked him about the difference between

the public perception of extraterrestrial visitors and scientists perception. It's an incredible gap of understanding between what the scientific view of this subject is and what the popular believer's point of view is. What's also interesting to me is both are motivated by the same curiosity. Astronomical scientists deeply what also, I think to discover any signs of intelligence life in the universe, and we have many programs trying to do that. At the same time, they know that in the public

this is a strong belief and desire also. But scientists are trained to be critical of evidence and not to accept things on face value, whereas many people in the public who are interested in these things put their skeptical side aside because they want to believe in this so much. And we have found this is to be a great danger in science. Think about Carol Rainey's assessment of Bud hopkins work on the Linda cortill A case. He wanted so badly to prove what he believed to be happening.

He wanted to prove that it was actually happening, and that he had evidence. This seemed to me a recurring issue in the abduction research field. In the absence of physical or substantial third person an eyewitness evidence, researchers would latch onto whatever corroboration they could. Thus the use of regression hypnosis as evidence, or Marjorie Fish's construction of the

star map models. This has to be worked out, so I have to figure out the absolute magnitude through all these stars, or the photos of body marks sent to Bud Hopkins. These are very characteristic and this is the scoop mark rather than the straight line cut. It's science like, but not with the same rigorous standards as science. The collective enterprise of creative thinking and skeptical thinking working together

keeps the field on track. So as exciting as this subject is, as interesting it is, as fascinating it is, those are signs that wishful thinking can go and take us out of reality. And it's something most scientists and certainly psychological scientists are well aware of. But it's something that I think more people who are fascinated with the subject as fans need to be aware of exercise critical

thinking and skepticism towards these ideas. Scientists haven't found any evidence of extra trastial intelligence, and yet the mythology is that we have and and they're coming, and they're here, and they've been here, and they're here all the time. The Betty and Barney Hill case requires this skepticism. The reality for me is that most, but not all, components of their story have convincing non extraterrestrial explanations. The regression

hypnosis elicited the story of Betty's dreams. The Hills mistook the light on top of Cannon Mountain for a UFO slow driving and numerous stops account for the missing time, but the explanations for parts of the story seem a

little less plausible. Well, I understand that wind up watches were easily broken, it seems like quite a coincidence that both Betty and Barney would break their watches at the same time in this way, and even the best explanations of the craft hovering above a field near Indian Head rely on Betty and Barney to be at near hallucinatory levels of fatigue and stress. The reality, though, is that the onus is not on skeptics to disprove every point

of the story. For an event this incredible, there needs to be real evidence, not just a story that is hard to explain away at points. The absence of a completely satisfying answer to what they saw in the field does not mean there was an alien spacecraft. The burden

of scientific proof lies with proponents of extraordinary stories. I remember that Carl Sagan said, at the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes and openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive, and the most ruthlessly skeptical scrutiny of all ideas old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. Although I am skeptical of the reality of the Hill abduction story, I think it's important to acknowledge

their contribution to popular culture. They and particularly Betty, created a narrative of alien abduction so compelling that it has proven durable for half a century. Through all the changes over the years, the core of abduction tales, whether purportedly real or fictional, has remained true to the story of the events of September nine. It's an astonishing legacy of cultural influence to emerge from a late night drive through

the mountains of New Hampshire. Next week, on a bonus episode of Strange Arrivals, my interview with Sarah Schools, author of They Are Already Here, UFO Culture and Why We

See Saucers. There was also a CIA sponsored panel called the Robertson Panel, and in their Scientists and Military Personnel, we're specifically looking at the effects that UFOs and UFO reports might have on people and chaos and panic, and they essentially said, if we get too many UFO reports, it might clog our intelligence channels and it might cause you know, hysteria in the streets. So what we need to do is essentially make propaganda to tell people not

to worry about UFOs. And so just throughout history for decades and decades, you have these instances of the government trying to manipulate public opinion and interpretation of UFOs, but then also saying like we have no interest in them and neither should you, and it just leaves people feeling like they can't trust the government on the topic I think and they're not wrong. Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey.

This episode was written and hosted by Toby Ball and produced by Miranda Hawkins and Josh Thane, with executive producers Alex Williams, Matt Frederick and Aaron Manky. Betty Hill was portrayed by Gina Rickikey. Barney Hill was portrayed by Jason Williams.

Special thanks to the Miln's Special Collections and Archives at the University of New Hampshire, John Horrigan, w y Am in Norwich, Connecticut, John White, and David O'Leary, the executive producer of the History Channel's dramatic series Project Blue Book learn more about the show over at grimm and mil dot com. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.