Page 39 - The 'X' Chronicles Newspaper - September 2021

The Barney and Betty Hill Case Explained?
Alien Abduction or
“Accidental Awareness”?
Continued from Page 37
What can anesthesia awareness teach us about
recovered memory? For one thing, the report
discusses different types of memory, including
“trauma memory.” Everyday memories are not
terribly descriptive. Intense emotional states,
such as those experienced during awareness,
create memories that are rich in sensory detail
and tend to burst out inappropriately, as in a
flashback. Trauma memories are not encoded as
logical narratives, but as globs of sensation.
Thus a sensory experience—like seeing a
hospital worker in scrubs—can cause an
awareness survivor to feel overwhelmed with
panic and to relive the sensation of paralysis she
suffered through while anesthetized.
PTSD researchers have found that trauma
memories are jumbled, and making sense of
them can be compared to putting together a
jigsaw puzzle. Memories are recovered in bits
and pieces. When Barney Hill heard the
playback of the tapes he had made while telling Perhaps in the future there will be fewer alien abducted should be encouraged to inform their
his story under hypnosis, he said “I felt so
overwhelmed and relieved. Now parts of my life
that had been missing were added to it again.
Parts of my life were being put back together.”
The story of his abduction by aliens helped him
create meaning out of a set of disjointed and
mysterious sensations, and that was weight off
his shoulders. Similarly, the Royal College
concluded that the awareness experience is less
traumatic when patients understand what is
happening, or receive an explanation after it has Alien abduction: a medical
occurred. Their report recommends that all
hospitals develop protocols for helping patients
with suspected or confirmed awareness. As a
poster advised on the website
awarenesstrauma.com, “I also found that
having the experience validated by the doctors
involved, was important to my recovery. . . but I
can tell you this was difficult to get, as they did Abstract
not want to admit to their mistake.”
There is another problem: a person can only
report an awareness experience if she
remembers it, which could take years or never
happen at all. Alien abduction may be one of
the most dramatic sequelae of anesthesia
awareness, but surely not the only one. Hate
jazz? If you have ever had surgery, it may not
just be your taste in music. One awareness
patient, formerly a jazz aficionado, developed a propose that experience with these may also be matched on age and gender. Experiencers were
bizarre aversion to the style after an awareness
experience. It was not until years later that she consciousness, uniformly colored figures with absorption, paranormal belief, paranormal
recalled hearing a favorite jazz piece playing in
the OR while awake during surgery.
The report recommends a number of changes in
anesthesia practice to minimize the impact of
awareness; in particular the decreased use of
neuromuscular blockade, which induces
paralysis in the patient and may not always be
necessary. The Royal College suggests that
patients be assessed post-operatively for
awareness experiences, and offered explanation,
reassurance, and counseling.
That’s all very rational, well-meaning, and in a percentage of patients, we should know
compassionate—human one might even say. about it; and persons who feel they have been
abductions. But it seems more likely that now surgeons
that they have invaded our bodies—and our challenging their beliefs. []
culture—for over 50 years, aliens will never
leave this planet for good.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Anne Skomorowsky
practices Psychosomatic Medicine at the New
York-Presbyterian Hospital. She is an Assistant
Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University
hypothesis
by David V Forrest
In response to a new psychological study of
persons who believe they have been abducted by
space aliens that found that sleep paralysis, a
history of being hypnotized, and preoccupation
with the paranormal and extraterrestrial were
predisposing experiences, I noted that many of
the frequently reported particulars of the
abduction experience bear more than a passing
resemblance to medical-surgical procedures and
contributory. There is the altered state of
prominent eyes, in a high-tech room under a
round bright saucerlike object; there is
nakedness, pain and a loss of control while the
body's boundaries are being probed; and yet the
figures are thought benevolent. No medical-
surgical history was apparently taken in the
above mentioned study, but psychological
laboratory work evaluated false memory
formation. I discuss problems in assessing
intraoperative awareness and ways in which the
medical hypothesis could be elaborated and
tested. If physicians are causing this syndrome
39
and anesthesiologists without
Psychological aspects of
the alien contact
experience
by Christopher C French
Abstract
Previous research has shown that people
reporting contact with aliens, known as
"experiencers", appear to have a different
psychological profile compared to control
participants. They show higher levels of
dissociativity, absorption, paranormal belief and
experience, and possibly fantasy proneness.
They also appear to show greater susceptibility
to false memories as assessed using the
Deese/Roediger-McDermott technique. The
present study reports an attempt to replicate
these previous findings as well as assessing
tendency to hallucinate and self-reported
incidence of sleep paralysis in a sample of 19
UK-based experiencers and a control sample
found to show higher levels of dissociativity,
experience, self-reported psychic ability, fantasy
proneness, tendency to hallucinate, and self-
reported incidence of sleep paralysis. No
significant differences were found between the
groups in terms of susceptibility to false
memories. Implications of the results are
discussed and suggestions are made for future
avenues of research.[]
(Publisher - Is The Barney and Betty Hill real or
a cash cow for those screaming out for attention
in this bizzarro world of ours?)