Debunk This! Updates:
Australian Government Sanctioned Paranormal Investigation Finds Video Proof of the Existence of Grey Aliens
INDEPENDENT WITNESSES CONFIRM THE REALITY OF WHITLEY STRIEBER'S ALIEN ABDUCTIONS
Here is Joe Rogan's take on the alien abduction phenomena followed by my response:
First off, here are some choice YouTube comments taking Rogan to task on some of his points:
Regarding the scientific study of alleged alien implants:
Other compelling evidence for a physical and not psychological phenomenon include the 1989 abduction case of Linda Napolitano from her Manhattan N.Y. apartment building, which was observed by 23 witnesses, including a UN dignitary, from the street below.
http://lindacortilecase.com/the-witnesses.html
Abduction researcher, Dr. David Jacobs, offered up a myriad of evidentiary points on the Skeptico podcast, favoring the view that there is a physical reality to abduction experiences:
Furthermore, "The UFO literature includes some well documented abduction cases which involve translocation; humans taken from one spot on the planet only to be dumped unceremoniously in another location, perhaps thousands of miles away. Let us look at a handful of these cases, each the subject of thorough investigation."
More...
Journal of Alternative Realities
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~amilani/jour1.html
Regarding daytime abductions:
"Thousands of individuals have reported their bizarre experiences to official agencies such as the police, the FBI, the Air Force and NASA, and to civilian UFO investigators and organizations, with no hope of personal gain and with a legitimate fear of ridicule." - Budd Hopkins, The Case for UFO Abductions as Physical Events
As the last YouTuber commenter that addressed John Mack suspected, Joe Rogan's take on alien abduction is something that Mack did indeed think about and address with two co-authors in the peer-reviewed literature.
Also notable, is the Star Map evidence from the Betty and Barney Hill abduction incident in 1961.
From the UFO Casebook website:
Of course the question remains of whether the aliens were really from any location shown on the map.
Budd Hopkins Exposes UFO Debunker Carl Sagan
Also worthy of consideration is the polygraph evidence pertaining to the Travis Walton UFO abduction case of 1975:
Finally, Rogan's assertion that a belief in things like astrology, the healing power of crystals, mind reading, or the Loch Ness monster would invalidate an individual's abduction experiences is bunkum for several reasons.
For one, it's an ad hominem fallacy. The GatecCreepers.com article, "Debunking Myths on Conspiracy Theories," notes:
Regarding astrology:
The Case for Astrology by John Anthony West
Australian Government Sanctioned Paranormal Investigation Finds Video Proof of the Existence of Grey Aliens
INDEPENDENT WITNESSES CONFIRM THE REALITY OF WHITLEY STRIEBER'S ALIEN ABDUCTIONS
Here is Joe Rogan's take on the alien abduction phenomena followed by my response:
First off, here are some choice YouTube comments taking Rogan to task on some of his points:
Dr. Roger K. Leir, author of the Aliens and the Scalpel-First and Second Edition, “UFO Crash in Brazil”, “Casebook Alien Implants”, “Chopped Liver” and three other books published outside the United States, including “Implantes Alienegenas” published in Portuguese in Brazil, and “Ovnis and Implants” published in France by Le Mercure Dauphinois.http://undebunkingufos.blogspot.com/2015/05/dr-roger-leir-turkish-ufo-videos.html
It has been said that Dr. Leir is one of the world’s most important leaders in physical evidence research involving the field of Ufology. He and his surgical team have performed fifteen surgeries on alleged alien abductees. This resulted in the removal of sixteen separate and distinct objects suspected of being alien implants. These objects have been scientifically investigated by some of the most prestigious laboratories in the world including Los Alamos National Labs, New Mexico Tech, Seal Laboratories, Southwest Labs, the University of Toronto, York University, and the University of California at San Diego. Their findings have been baffling and some comparisons have been made to Meteorite Samples. In addition some of the tests show metallurgical anomalies such as highly Magnetic Iron that is without crystalline form, combinations of crystalline materials mixed common metals, growth of biological tissue into or out of metallic substances, as well as isotopic ratios not of this world. Dr. Leir has also been involved in investigations of other areas of Ufology involving physical evidence. He has traveled to Brazil and performed exhaustive research into the Varginha, Brazil case. In 2003 Dr. Leir worked with one of the worlds leading geneticists and the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) on a DNA study pertaining to evidence collected in a famous California Alien Abduction Case. Dr. Leir was a recent participant (NOV. 2007) in an international press conference held at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. Evidence from thirteen Military officers, pertaining to their experiences with UFO’s was presented to a worldwide media.
More...
Other compelling evidence for a physical and not psychological phenomenon include the 1989 abduction case of Linda Napolitano from her Manhattan N.Y. apartment building, which was observed by 23 witnesses, including a UN dignitary, from the street below.
One of the landmark cases of UFO abduction occurred on November 30, 1989, in Manhattan, N.Y. The case centers around one Linda Napolitano, who claims to have been abducted from her closed apartment window into a waiting UFO by the "grays," and subjected to medical procedures. The case became well-known through the efforts of researcher Budd Hopkins. The events began at 3:00 AM...
It would be a year after the actual abduction before Hopkins began receiving mail from two men, who claimed to have seen the abduction. At first, Hopkins was suspect of their testimony, but in time their reports would help build the case into one of the most well-documented alien abductions in Ufology. Without any contact with Napolitano, their report agreed in all aspects with Linda's memories.
Javier Perez de Cuellar:
Eventually, the two men would be identified as bodyguards of senior United Nations statesman, Javier Perez de Cuellar, who was visiting Manhattan at the time of the abduction.
The bodyguards claimed that Cuellar was "visibly shaken" as he watched the abduction. The three men claimed that they saw a woman being floated through the air, along with three small beings, into a large flying craft...
More Witnesses Come Forward:
There would eventually be more witnesses come forward with their accounts of what they had seen. Hopkins kept the details of the eyewitness testimony private until he felt the case was complete enough to release publicly. One of the most striking accounts came from Janet Kimball, who was a retired telephone operator. She had seen the abduction also, but thought she was watching a movie scene being filmed...
Private Confirmation:
Cuellar did aid Hopkins in verifying details of the case through correspondence, but explained to Hopkins why he could not go public with his testimony. This would always leave a gap in the investigation, although there were other witnesses, and Linda's own account of her terrible ordeal. Despite some ups and downs, Hopkins probably did his finest work in bringing together the story of the abduction of Linda Napolitano...http://ufos.about.com/od/aliensalienabduction/p/manhattan.htm
Fact #1
Witness #1 - Ear, Nose and Throat Specialist (1976)
Witness #2 - "Erica" (Winter of 1990)
Witness #3 - Richard (Early February, 1991)
Witness #4 - Dan (Early February, 1991)
Witness #5 - Linda's Husband Steve (Sunday February 24, 1991)
Witness #6 - Linda's Son Steven (March 1991)
Witness #7 - The Third Man (April 12, 1991)
Witness #8 - "Janet Kimball" (Late July 1991)
Witness #9 - "Joseph" (September 3, 1991)
Witness #10 - Dr. Lisa Bayer Podiatric Surgeon (November 12, 1991)
Witness #11 - Carmela (February 22, 1992)
Witness #12 - Brian (Sunday May 24, 1992)
Witness #13 - Sue (July 1992)
Witness #14 - Johnny Cortile (Sunday May 24, 1992)
Witness #15 - "Marilyn Kilmer" (September 30, 1992)
Witness #16 - Frank Turner (Summer of 1993)
Witness #17 - Cathy Turner (Summer of 1993)
Witness #18 - Cardinal John O'Connor (November 1993)
Witness #19 - Reporter Jay Sapir (November 12, 1993)
Witness #20 - "Francesca" (Sunday April 16, 1995)
Witness #21 - New York Post Worker Yancy Spence (Late 2001)
Witness #22 - New York Post Worker Bobby (Late 2001)Witness #23 - Reporter Steve Dunleavy (Late 2002)
Fact #2
The 23 witnesses that are on the public record in the Linda Cortile UFO abduction case were introduced incrementally at random dates and times over a total period of 27 years. There was a 14 year interval between the introduction of the first witness and the second witness. There was a 17 month interval between the introduction of the nineteenth witness and the twentieth witness. There was a 6 year interval between the introduction of the twentieth witness and the twenty-first witness.
For those who contend that the Linda Cortile case must be a hoax, a fraudulent scheme crafted and perpetrated to get rich quick, why were the witnesses introduced into the case incrementally at random dates and times, with yearlong gaps in between some introductions, over a painstakingly slow period of 27 years?...
This website has been built primarily as a consolidation of publicly released information and evidence about the Linda Cortile UFO abduction case. It has also been built to factually demonstrate the inaccurate and libellous nature of the multitude of attacks and allegations levelled against it over the years by a handful of subjective critics.http://lindacortilecase.com/index.html
While Linda's case has been publicly defended in the past, the defenses, for the most part, have only been done in a very general way. The reason for this was because of the sheer enormity of erroneous claims that were contrived, constructed and distributed attacking the case, over fifty-five pages worth. The fact that each of the bogus claims were not individually addressed, rebutted and factually dismantled in detail, was perceived as proof, by some, that the false claims must be true. For others who applied a modicum of time, energy and resources into investigating the case for themselves, as well as the foundations of the allegations made against it, they arrived at completely different conclusions...
http://lindacortilecase.com/the-witnesses.html
Abduction researcher, Dr. David Jacobs, offered up a myriad of evidentiary points on the Skeptico podcast, favoring the view that there is a physical reality to abduction experiences:
What the scientific and academic communities are doing is they are simply abrogating the responsibility to study this subject. You have to understand. For example, the UFO phenomenon and the abduction phenomenon together are global in nature. In the abduction phenomenon, you have people coming from all around the world, from all different walks of life, having wildly different backgrounds from Ph.Ds and M.Ds and psychiatrists and psychologists to people who have dropped out of school in the 12th grade. I had one person who was 12 years old. They’re all saying the same exact things from around the world. Yet there’s no interest in this whatsoever.
Let me tell you a few other things that just astonish me every time I think about it. In the abduction phenomena, people are physically missing from their normal environments when they are abducted. Police have been called, search parties have been sent out, kids hunt for their parents, parents hunt for their children during abductions. They’re not there. And this phenomenon, it’s not happening yet this is what people are reporting all the time.http://www.skeptiko.com/230-david-jacobs-academia-alien-contact/
Not only that, but people are abducted in groups and can confirm each other’s abductions. Now oftentimes these are family groups where they might be in cahoots together but sometimes they’re not family groups. They’re neighbors and they can confirm each other’s abductions. Or even strangers who they meet on the street and they know immediately they’ve seen this person before. Yet it’s not happening.
People who return from abductions and have unusual marks and scars on their bodies. I have seen this—fully formed scar tissue literally the next day. I have seen this in person. I had a session with a woman once who was perfectly fine. She saw me the next morning and she had two one-inch scars on each hand in exactly the same place that were not there the day before, to my unbelievable, breath-taking amazement. That is not possible and yet this phenomenon is not happening.
So if I grant that it’s not happening, that people are not being abducted, then abduction researchers have stumbled upon one of the most important areas of human cognition that has ever been found.
Furthermore, "The UFO literature includes some well documented abduction cases which involve translocation; humans taken from one spot on the planet only to be dumped unceremoniously in another location, perhaps thousands of miles away. Let us look at a handful of these cases, each the subject of thorough investigation."
More...
Journal of Alternative Realities
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~amilani/jour1.html
Regarding daytime abductions:
Featuring sixteen never-before-published cases, Sight Unseen probes two newly uncovered patterns in alien abduction: cases of UFO "invisibility" and reports of genetically altered alien beings who interact with humans during their routine lives.
The "invisibility" accounts detailed by Budd Hopkins include numerous daylight abductions in densely populated urban areas -- all apparently unseen and accomplished through a technology of invisibility.
(Source: Sight Unseen: Science, UFO Invisibility and Transgenic BeingsIn Sight Unseen, Hopkins relates the "invisibility" case of "two air force non-coms, Dennis and B.J., who are snatched from the tarmac of a busy military airfield." Also included are cases where, as another writer summed it up, "experiencers are returned wearing someone else’s clothing, or their own clothing is on backwards or inside out."
"Thousands of individuals have reported their bizarre experiences to official agencies such as the police, the FBI, the Air Force and NASA, and to civilian UFO investigators and organizations, with no hope of personal gain and with a legitimate fear of ridicule." - Budd Hopkins, The Case for UFO Abductions as Physical Events
As the last YouTuber commenter that addressed John Mack suspected, Joe Rogan's take on alien abduction is something that Mack did indeed think about and address with two co-authors in the peer-reviewed literature.
John Mack, M.D.
John E. Mack, M.D., professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and founder of the Center for Psychology & Social Change, explores how extraordinary experiences can affect personal, societal and global transformation. He is the author of many books detailing how one's perceptions shape relationships with one another and with the world, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of T.E. Lawrence, A Prince of Our Disorder, Abduction, and Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters.
articles & documents
Since the publication of the hardcover edition of "Abduction", questions have been raised about the reality of the alien abduction phenomenon. These questions relate to the nature of the physical evidence which accompanies the abduction reports; the clients' expectations and possible investigator influence; the reliability of memory; the degree to which hypnosis influences the accuracy of memory; and alternatives to the hypothesis that what the experiencers describe is what has occurred. These are questions that can only be answered fully by a great deal more research. This appendix has been added to begin a discussion of these questions… R
Caroline McLeod, Barbara Corbisier, and John E. Mack
A comprehensive commentary published in Psychological Inquiry, An International Journal of Peer Commentary and Review, Vol. 7 No. 2, 1996 We present evidence that abduction experiences cannot be readily explained by constructs such as hypnotic elaboration, masochism, and fantasy proneness. Abduction accounts cannot be dismissed as hypnotic elaboration because approximately 30% of these accounts are obtained without hypnosis. Finally, there is evidence that individuals reporting abduction experiences are not more hypnotizable or fantasy prone than the general population.
http://www.ufoevidence.org/topics/JohnMack.htmMore...
Also notable, is the Star Map evidence from the Betty and Barney Hill abduction incident in 1961.
One of the more memorable events that took place while they were on board the alien spacecraft was Betty Hill’s impromptu question to the leader being as she asks him: Where do you come from? She was very curious about their origins and wanted to know where his home port was, so she asked him where he was from; and then in response, he asked her if she knew anything about the universe. She advised him that she knew practically nothing. The leader being in the room with her then walked across the room and opened up a cabinet in the side and pulled out a map from the opening in the wall, he put it up and then he asked her if she had ever seen a map like this before? Betty then walked across the room and looked up to view the star map that she said was a three dimensional holographic image of the heavens. Betty says she leaned against the table that was in front of her. Under hypnosis Betty described the star map as being oblong. The star map that she was looking at had dots scattered all over it, some were little, some just pin-points, and two others were as big as a nickel. She went into further detail as she then said that she saw curved lines going from one dot to another. When Betty asked him to explain what the lines indicated, he told her that the broken lines were expeditions to other worlds. As she looked at the star map she wondered where he was from, and then out of curiosity she asked him where he was from, but he never volunteered the answer. Instead he turned the question around and asked her: “Where are you on this map?”http://www.exopoliticssouthafrica.org/news/in-depth/9-the-betty-hill-star-map-part-1
Betty chuckled and told him that she didn’t know; and then he replied, “If you don’t know where you are, there wouldn’t be any point in my telling you where I am from.” He never volunteered any specific information as to where their home world was at. John Fuller would later write the book: The Interrupted Journey documenting the Betty and Barney Hill story.
In 1968, Marjorie Fish of Oak Harbor, Ohio read Fuller's Interrupted Journey. She was an elementary school teacher and amateur astronomer. Intrigued by the "star map", Fish wondered if it might be "deciphered" to determine which star system the UFO came from. Assuming that one of the fifteen stars on the map must represent the Earth's Sun, Fish constructed a three-dimensional model of nearby Sun-like stars using thread and beads, basing stellar distances on those published in the 1969 Gliese Star Catalogue. Studying thousands of vantage points over several years, the only one that seemed to match the Hill map was from the viewpoint of the double star system of Zeta Reticuli.
Distance information needed to match three stars, forming the distinctive triangle Hill said she remembered, was not generally available until the 1969 Gliese Catalogue came out.
Fish sent her analysis to Webb. Agreeing with her conclusions, Webb sent the map to Terence Dickinson, editor of the popular magazine Astronomy. Dickinson did not endorse Fish and Webb's conclusions, but for the first time in the journal's history, Astronomy invited comments and debate on a UFO report, starting with an opening article in the December 1974 issue. For about a year afterward, the opinions page of Astronomy carried arguments for and against Fish's star map. Notable was an argument made by Carl Sagan and Steven Soter,[28] arguing that the seeming "star map" was little more than a random alignment of chance points. In contrast, those more favorable to the map, such as David Saunders, a statistician who had been on the Condon UFO study, argued that unusual alignment of key Sun-like stars in a plane centered around Zeta Reticuli (first described by Fish) was statistically improbable to have happened by chance from a random group of stars in our immediate neighborhood.[29][30]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barney_and_Betty_Hill#Analyzing_the_star_map
Stanton Friedman quote: Saga’s UFO Report Page 32, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 1974
“It wasn't until the updated 1969 Gliese Catalogue of Nearby Stars became available to Marjorie that the last three stars with connecting lines as well as the stars in the triangle could be pinned down and identified in the Constellation Fornax. The triangle stars are identified by the Gliese numbers of 86.1, 95, and 97. With that specific star data, Marjorie had all the proof she needed to confirm that Betty's map could only have been drawn at the time as the result of contact with extraterrestrials!”
There are UFO researchers who believe the location was incorrect, but agree the implications are the same.From the UFO Casebook website:
Saying that Marjorie Fish had all the proof she needed to confirm that Betty's map could only have been drawn at the time as the result of contact with extraterrestrials is essentially correct as far as the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill is concerned. But her ZR interpretation of the star map is a mistaken assumption.https://www.ufocasebook.com/2009d/hillwilson.html
Of course the question remains of whether the aliens were really from any location shown on the map.
Budd Hopkins Exposes UFO Debunker Carl Sagan
Also worthy of consideration is the polygraph evidence pertaining to the Travis Walton UFO abduction case of 1975:
Finally, Rogan's assertion that a belief in things like astrology, the healing power of crystals, mind reading, or the Loch Ness monster would invalidate an individual's abduction experiences is bunkum for several reasons.
For one, it's an ad hominem fallacy. The GatecCreepers.com article, "Debunking Myths on Conspiracy Theories," notes:
Myth #4: Conspiracy theorists believe in UFOs / Aliens / Apollo Moon / Holocaust denial
This is a straw man and an ad hominem fallacy. Not all conspiracy theorists believe in the same things, nor does believing in aliens invalidate their arguments on other theories. The only thing linking these things is that they are all perceived to be conspiracy theories. Each should be evaluated on its own merits.These points hold true for claimed abductees as well, but in reverse. Their beliefs on unrelated topics do not invalidate their claims of abduction. Each of these things Rogan mentions should be evaluated on its own merits. It just so happens that I have done just that and it is plainly obvious, that Rogan has done a cursory examination at best of the any subjects, just as is the case with main topic at hand. Coming down on the side of belief for these issues is nowhere near being analogous, to say, an individual claiming abduction also reporting to hearing voices in their head, a truly accepted mental health issue that Mack would easily flesh out.
Regarding astrology:
The Case for Astrology by John Anthony West
