Category: Martin Kottmeyer

The Boundary Deficit Hypothesis Posted on

1988: Abductions: The Boundary Deficit Hypothesis

1988 by Martin Kottmeyer As claims about the reality of alien abductions multiply, the assertion is increasingly heard that psychology offers little or no insight into how such experiences could occur if they are unreal. Abductees are normal people. Tests prove it. How, then, could normal people make such impossible claims as those found in abduction narratives and not be right? If this assertion is true, the theatre version of the UFO phenomenon is in jeopardy. To the extent that the UFO phenomenon is a genre of theatre and an expression of the human imagination, it must be amenable to psychological study. Clearly this is a paradox that needs to be addressed. Drama is quintessentially involved with conflict, the exercise of power. Aliens and their […] Read More

Cultural Background of UFO Abduction Reports Posted on

1990: Cultural Background of UFO Abduction Reports

copyright (c) 1990 by Martin S. Kottmeyer [Reprinted from “Magonia” Magazine, Jan. 1990, by permission of the author] Culture is an admixture of repetition and variation, convention and creativity, signals and noise. It is ever new and forever old as humanity relives old dreams and nightmares or forgets and forges new ones. Part of the delight of history is the recognition that however new a given event appears, traces of the past can generally be discerned. If the UFO phenomenon is an artifact of culture one would reasonably expect that cultural antecedent could be recognized for the major features it presents. Extraterrestrials, however, should be independent of culture and if they are newly arrived their characteristics should represent a discontinuity with the past. Abduction […] Read More

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Any similarity between Kelston’s star map and Betty Hill’s is almost purely accidental. The paradox they share, however, is not. Betty’s sketch has the two planets Kelston’s lacks. (Marjorie Fish treats them as stars, ironically. Stars don’t have terminators.) But when the alien asks Betty where on the map the Earth is, she relives the movie-goer’s puzzlement. She has no idea. The sizes of the planets bear comparison to the planets in the starfield in the credits of the film, incidentally. Parenthetically, the script of “Invaders From Mars” has Kelston present a large scrapbook with newspaper columns about saucer activities to the boy before the star map discussion. This was not in the 78-minute video I saw, but an 82-minute “European” version exists that […] Read More

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He follows this with Jose Parra’s sighting of six small hairy creatures by a saucer and they’re transfixing him with a bright light. [24] In Betty Hill’s nightmare she must fight for consciousness and she finds herself surrounded by four short men. Barney is unconscious and is being dragged by another group of men. They numbered eight to eleven when standing in the middle of the road. They are taken from the car to a glowing saucer-shaped craft. The behavior of the aliens is very professional and businesslike and they are dressed in somewhat military style. They are not frightening per se. This is very much in keeping in tone with Keyhoe’s speculations that aliens were making a scientific study of the planet out […] Read More

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What, then, are we to make of the 1930 comic strip story “Tiger Men of Mars” in the series “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century“? It adheres to Bullard’s structure most excellently. Wilma experiences: (i) capture by a giant clamp leading into a spherical alien spaceship, (ii) examination while lying on a table in an electro-hypnotic trance, (iii)conference with a subordinate and then a leader, (vi) theophany while gazing at the Earth from an off-world vantage point, (vii)return, In the aftermath, there is an instance of what Bullard calls “networking” in the aliens abducting Wilma’s sister, Sally. There is also an apocalyptic finale in which the Martian moon Phobos crashes on Mars.[18] Some idea of the structural impressiveness of this narrative can be gained […] Read More

Cultural Background of UFO Abduction Reports Posted on

Cultural Background of UFO Abduction Reports 2

Hopkins’s descriptions leave something to be desired. The godly aliens of CE3K trash the home of the little boy Barry and they terrorize his mother as they abduct him. They disrupt the life and mind of Neary. Kindly and spiritual Klaatu happens to have a robot with him who is all business. His offer to leave the police force is eminently pragmatic. The comparison is frivolous in either case since any UFO aliens matching these descriptions go into the contactee file. Hopkins professes it is instructive that his abductees are not devoured like in War of the Worlds, but how would a myth devour a person? That Hopkins is ignorant of science fiction would be apparent to any fan by the fact that he […] Read More

The Boundary Deficit Hypothesis Posted on

The Boundary Deficit Hypothesis 4

In addition to forming a coherent assembly of the known facts about the psychology of abductees, the boundary-deficit hypothesis is richly testable. Hartmann’s profile offers numerous predictions about the inner world of abductees. Those listed above are just a fraction of the possibilities. If you want to know if missing time derives from a fluid time sense or a fluid memory, you can test people who report this for concomitant phenomena: frequent episodes of deja vu or jamais vu, primal repression dated to two or three years of age as opposed to four or five, days organised according to flexible rather than rigid schedules, future plans lacking specific time frames, and a tendency to not answer questions in a temporally structured pattern. The core […] Read More

The Boundary Deficit Hypothesis Posted on

The Boundary Deficit Hypothesis 3

The boundary-deficit hypothesis evidently can also be invoked to explain the unusual proportion of artist-type individuals that I discovered in testing Rimmer’s hypothesis. Roughly one-third of abductees showed evidence of artistic self-expression in their backgrounds in my sample population, as you may recall. Hartmann’s study would also lead us to expect an unusual number of psychotherapists among abductees. In a recent paper, Budd Hopkins reported that in a population of 180 probable abductees he found many mental health professionals: two psychiatrists, three Ph.D. psychologists and an unstated number of psychotherapists with Master’s degrees. (12) It would obviously be a child’s play to pick and choose isolated bits of confirming or discordant biographical information from the abductee literature and argue about the fit of Hartmann’s […] Read More

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The Boundary Deficit Hypothesis 2

Boundary theory begins with the axiom that as the mind matures, it categorizes experiences. It walls off certain sets to be distinct from other sets. Boundaries become set up between what is self and what is non-self, between sleep and waking experiences, between fantasy and reality, passion and reason, ego and id, masculine and feminine, and a large host of other experiential categories. This drive to categorize is subject to natural variation. The determinants of the strength of that drive appear to be biochemical and genetic and probably have no environmental component such as trauma. When the drive is weak the boundaries between categories are thinner, more permeable or more fluid. When the boundaries become abnormally thin one sees psychopathologies like schizophrenia. Hartmann discovered […] Read More