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 the scientifically educated public’s requirement that the methods of investigation be explained clearly enough so that the techniques can be both criticized and repeated by others. Understandably but unfortunately, the current practice (for obvious financial and personal reasons) has been for each serious and productive investigator to present his or her own findings in a maximally attractive public package, in order to reap the personal rewards for the effort made, since there are absolutely no academic or “establishment” financial or social rewards for being a conscientious and intelligent UFO or abduction researcher which would compensate anyone for the time and effort expended. There is now, however, both a place for and an intellectual demand for a methodological and empirical synthesis of current good abduction research, just as there are a similar need and demand for an equivalent review and synthesis of the past thirty years of UFO research. Such a synthesis would have to address the methodological issues raised in this essay, as well as the rich store of excellent abduction and UFO data which have been collected, weighed, and evaluated by the current generation of UFO and abduction researchers.