Category:  Don Donderi

REFERENCES 1. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition, Unabridged (New York: Random House, 1987). 2. Elizabeth Loftus. Eyewitness Testimony (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1979). 3. Gilda Moura, “A Transpersonal Approach to Abduction Therapy,” in Andrea Pritchard, David E. Pritchard, John Mack, et al., eds. Alien Discussions: Proceedings of the Alien Abduction Study Conference (Cambridge, Mass.: North Cambridge Press, 1994), 485- 92. See also Loftus, I 95. 4. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations [l776] (New York: Modern Library, 1937), 4-5. 5. John Garcia, “Tilting at the Paper Mills of Academe,” American Psychologist 36, no.2 (1981): 149-58. 6. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, 1962). 7. Abraham Pais, Subtle is the Lord: The Science and […] Read More

CONCLUSION: A SYNTHESIS IS NEEDED So where are we? We lack certainty in dealing with evidence elicited by hypnosis or recall alone. We need corroborating evidence: other people’s testimony to an observer being abducted (e.g., the Linda case), missing or found in a disordered state after a hypnotically recalled abduction experience. Or else we need corroborating physical evidence of an abduction: evidence that something has been around to confirm the abductee’s report of being abducted into something. This is no more or no less than the kind of evidence we need to corroborate UFO reports. After all, a UFO report is no less a report of personal experience than is an abduction report. Even book-length compendiums of single or multiple cases need to respect […] Read More

SCIENTIFIC ASPECTS OF THE ABDUCTION PHENOMENON Obstacles to acceptance. The “general UFO hypothesis” which encompasses the existence of extraterrestrial spaceships and the abduction of people into them has to overcome a series of barriers to credibility. Each barrier is actually the threshold of acceptance among technically educated people for a series of isolated ideas which cannot be easily assimilated into the current coherent picture of the world. The unassimilated picture presented by the UFO hypothesis is much too rich for the average scientist’s taste. It includes telepathy, movement through solids, craft maneuvering at what are for us unattainable and dangerous g-forces, and propulsion with no apparent reaction against the atmosphere. The average scientist falls back on a much more plausible psychological explanation for this […] Read More

SCIENCE AND THE UFO/ABDUCTION PHENOMENON There is a great reluctance on the part of some investigators to stick to a scientific approach to the abduction phenomenon. The argument runs something like this. Our systematic understanding of nature is severely limited; science doesn’t even explain many things about inanimate nature, other animals, or the human mind. Not only that, but the technical or scientific approach to the mastery and understanding of nature has led mankind into grievous errors that threaten to destroy the species if not the planet. Therefore, we should abandon science in dealing with this new phenomenon, particularly since it is so far beyond our comprehension as to make the idea of a scientific theory to explain UFOs or abductions meaningless. We can’t […] Read More

THE ABDUCTION REPORT What is the UFO abduction phenomenon? To abduct means to “carry off or lead away (a person) illegally and in secret or by force, esp. to kidnap.”(1) Anyone who reports that he or she has been carried away by force is reporting an abduction. Since we are obviously only concerned with abductions by nonhuman extraterrestrials, the carrying-away must be reported as done by nonhuman extraterrestrials. Evidence for the non-humanness of the abductors comes from the appearance of the abductors, the tools they use, including the methods of enforcing the abduction, the things they do, and the locations to which the abductee is taken. If none of these are nonhuman, then we are talking about an abduction experience, but one which can […] Read More