So something is surely going on, but it might be activities performed by govermental agencies or military units that they want to keep secret, whatever it costs, and not activities performed by aliens.

I think the case referred to above is the Ramona case, in which a girl "recovered" memories of years of ritualized sexual abuse, perpetrated by her father, and multiple abortions. The only problem was that her hymen was intact. Gary Ramona sued his daughter's therapist and won.

In any case, thank you for "educating" us.

Stephen, all of your "ifs" are inappropriate.

You said, "The onus of responsibility is not on researchers to demonstrate that recovered memories are false." No. The burden of proof lies with the claimant, in this case with the claims of 'false memory' implantation.

Technically, of course, it is difficult to 'prove' a human event that occurred many years previously and selectively occurred only in the absence of uninvolved adult witnesses. However, many of the memories that my patients recall are corroborated -- hospital records of mothers beaten into comas, for example. You'll have to take my word for it.

Alien abductions are interpretive distortions of such human-perpetrated events. Only a kook therapist would believe that alien abductions had a basis in fact, though I dare say that some kooks have become unlicensed therapists, even psychiatrists.

Our nearest star is 4 1/2 light years away, and there is *no* evidence that any close planetary system could support life, so aliens would have to travel many more than 5 yrs at the speed of light just to make a visit for the purpose of highly selective abductions of a few kids. Unless you insist on conjecturing a wormhole highway in the sky. So, as to those, often emotionally damaged individuals, who believe that there are aliens among us, the less said the better. It's quite extraordinary what ridiculous things people love to believe in the absence of any confirmatory evidence.

Back to the topic. The research findings that I have described for FMS have been misapplied. The FM Foundation, which was founded by the accused, has politicized those findings in an attempt to discredit witnesses, and they have succeeded in fooling those who are not in a position to assess the clinical material. (Just as the RC Church protected its own reputation by hiding the activities of its priests, or do you think that those recollections were implanted by anti-RC therapists?)

The result of all this politicized information is that the uninformed tend to be deluded into a blame the therapist, disbelieve the victim, and protect the perpetrator position. The tragedy is that some unskilled therapists have also been scared into not treating victims, compounding the damage and the travesty.

As one of you said, anecdotal examples can be misleading, and some of you have provided anecdotal examples without links, and no links or references to impressive, contradictory information. As to the claim that a young woman had not been pregnant, did they extract both her ovaries and examine them histologically? I'd bet not. The hormones that are elevated with pregnancies fall very rapidly post-termination.

I said that memories of abuse cannot be implanted, and I stand by that on the basis of experience with the emotional associations to be expected with genuine traumatic experiences, both recent and distant. False information, such as belief in the 'innocence' of perpetrators and 'guilt' of therapists can be implanted in those who have not had experience in the field. The 'memories' investigated by Loftus and others are of the latter, unemotional, untraumatic kind.

Yes, innocent people are occasionally convicted of crimes both recent and long past. This is always regrettable, but one false conviction does not overturn even one accurate conviction, let alone the hundreds of appropriate convictions and false acquittals. I'm saying that each case should be judged on its merits. As a matter of fact, I am immensely more concerned with therapy for victims than with determining guilt or advocating punishment of perpetrators. Don't be fooled that defence lawyers are concerned about determining truth.

This is as much educating as I'm prepared to do. This is too much like a busman's holiday. I prefer to focus my leisure on learning new fields, not revisiting work. If you are curious about the topic, there are a few good websites with general information, but highly specialized information is more difficult to find, and is difficult to assess without clinical experience.

Gordon Cooper: No Mercury UFO
By Robert Scott Martin

Staff Writer
posted: 06:37 pm ET
10 September 1999

Pioneering astronaut Gordon Cooper denies being the first astronaut to see a UFO while in orbit, but stands by his reports of a strange encounter over Germany in the 1950s.

Cooper flatly denied the long-standing claim, repeated over the years by various authors including UFOlogical saints Allen Hynek and Jacques Valley, that he saw a greenish object with a red tail move past his Mercury 9 spacecraft in 1963.

"No, somebody made a lot of money selling … lies on that one," Cooper, the sixth American in space, told Art Bell on the syndicated "Coast to Coast" talk radio show Thursday night. "It was totally untrue, sorry to say."

However, the retired air force colonel, who once lectured the United Nations on the reality of UFOs, still holds an "unshakable" belief in extraterrestrial intelligence, thanks largely to personal experience.

"On one occasion, I saw some strange vehicles that we assumed were UFOs," he told Bell.

In the encounter, which took place over Germany in the early 1950s, Cooper saw "flights of fighters flying by in the same sort of formation we flew, moving east to west." The U.S. Air Force base scrambled its own pilots, including Cooper, who remembers the objects as looking "just like saucers -- they were metallic looking, but we couldn't really get close enough to see more than that. You couldn't see any wings on them."

At the time, Cooper entertained the possibility that the craft might be a new Soviet design, but "looking back now," he suspects "it was some kind of extraterrestrial vehicle."

He also stood by his belief that he saw a UFO land at Edwards Air Force Base in California in 1957. Although Cooper had been filming the base with a camera crew at the time, the film, which he handed over to a high-ranking officer from Washington, has never emerged.

Area 51 and the lost Gemini photographs

After another round of filming --- this time in orbit aboard Gemini 5 -- Cooper ran into trouble with the authorities when they confiscated film he took from space. However, in contrast to UFO legend, this film did not contain photographic proof of an alien encounter.

Instead, he had ran afoul of the authorities for taking pictures of the "top secret" Nevada military base known familiarly as "Area 51".

"I found out fairly recently that one of the reasons it got confiscated was I had inadvertently … overflown Area 51," while taking test photos, he said.

Cooper had no comment on the Great Face on Mars.

"That's one of the reasons you need to send a manned mission to Mars, to study that stuff closer," he told Bell, gently criticizing today's NASA and recent presidential administrations for lacking the "bravery" to build on previous generations' space advances.

Today's aliens prefer to land near Mississippi trailer parks. :^)

Oh yeah, they're a buncha rocket scientists, alright.

In several of his posts, Ebonmuse has mentioned that the number of professing atheists is up by X%, or that Y% of the public is becoming more skeptical of Christianity, and so on. Which is of course wonderful. Except that even if these changes are permanent (and so far I'm unconvinced), the old ways of irrational thinking are simply being replaced by new ways, like UFO cults and "Ghost Hunter" philosophy.

It's a bit discouraging, hacking away at a hydra.

At any rate...

I just started reading your blog recently, and I'm really enjoying it. Great stuff and usually very well communicated.

Just one thing on this post: you say "Hypnosis is ineffective at helping a person recall what they did under the influence of [scopolamine]."

I've just recently heard about scopolamine (watched a very intense documentary), and have not heard about any studies on how it (or similar drugs such as flunitrazepam (roofies)) affect hypnosis. Could you point me towards where you heard about this? Recent discoveries in neuroscience about how storage and recall actually work as well as an argument with my girlfriend have had me really curious about the topic.