Follow-up to my interview with Dr. Jacobs
About a week ago, I posted my interview with Dr. David Jacobs, of the International Center for Abduction Research. My process is to record my introduction before starting the interview, so that if I get some facts wrong the guest can catch me and I can redo the intro. For example, I mistakenly said that Temple University, where Dr. Jacobs is a tenured professor, was in Chicago, when it was actually in Philadelphia (and I had even written in my notes beforehand that Temple was in Philadelphia; something got lost on the way to my mouth). Then, I edit the interview, and as I do so I come across things to bring up during my outro, which I record after the interview is edited down. In the past, it's been a few things, so I've just shared all my thoughts there. But listening to the interview with Dr. Jacobs, there was so much to add that I didn't want to make the episode longer than it already was. Below the fold are my long-winded thoughts.
A good place to start is to look at the comment left by Michael Britt, host of The Psych Files, another excellent psychology podcast, which recently celebrated its 100th episode. Congratulations, Michael! Michael notes that Dr. Jacobs sets up a dilemma where people who aren't as steeped in the scientific literature as he is shouldn't be taken as seriously as people who have devoted their lives to the area of research. The thing is, you're never going to find a critic of the alien abduction phenomenon that has devoted their life to it. There are researchers, such as Dr. Chris French, whom I interviewed previously, who have done some level of serious published research into the matter, but their knowledge is nothing compared to the stories Dr. Jacobs has. The reason that critics don't spend their lives studying the abduction phenomenon isn't because they are ignorant of the data, it's that they've examined the best data and found it lacking. Why study something without promise? For skeptics, it's just a few people who have weird experiences. It's of interest, but not of dire consequence for most. But for believers, it's a total world-changer; if we were actually being visited by aliens, I would be really tempted to make that my life's work too.
The second point Michael made that I wanted to discuss is about memory. Dr. Jacobs claimed that memory won't be heavily distorted in alien abduction accounts, because the time between the event and the reporting is sometimes days, or even hours. I'm taking a cognitive psychology class on the side, and we're just getting to memory research. The distorting effects of memory occur seconds after the event. There seems to be a lot of research about cars. For example, if we see a BMW and a Volkswagon Polo going the same speed, we're likely to remember the BMW as going faster, and this effect only takes a day to set in — and may increase over time. Elizabeth Loftus, in a four-page, very accessible article in Nature Reviews Neuroscience (PDF), points out many similar examples from real life. For example, people misreported the D.C. sniper as driving a white van, when this was not the case — and the witnesses gave their reports days or even minutes after reportedly seeing it. In short, Dr. Jacobs underestimates the malleability of memory.
I started having questions and objections from the beginning. I was talking with a tenured professor at a major university who has made his career, from his Ph.D. dissertation onward, defending the existence of the UFO and alien abduction phenomenon. He's edited and written several popular books. So it sounds disingenuous to me to say that it's all hardship to come out of the abduction closet as an intellectual. It seemed like an attempt to gain sympathy from me and my audience, and to establish his credibility using an argument from embarrassment, but for me it rang hollow.
Speaking of the argument from embarrassment, the first few minutes of the interview consisted of Dr. Jacobs explaining why the argument from embarrassment should give us confidence that the accounts of alien abductions are true. I've never found the argument from embarrassment very convincing, and all it could prove is that these people are honest and earnest in their statements — something skeptics like Dr. French don't doubt.
When Dr. Jacobs was talking about group abduction stories, where two or three people are able to confirm each other's stories, he's assuming that since this proves they aren't having delusions that that makes it true. It reminds me of the Salem Witch Trials, where a few teenage girls made up stories, and the lies got out of control. Dr. Jacobs would say that no one would ever lie about such an outrageous thing, but hey – the stories, true or false, are believed by many. And he could have used the same argument at the Salem Witch Trials.
I would also disagree with his description of fantasies as basically “happy places we can go in our mind” (my words, not his), and that fantasy-prone personality is when men indulge in feeling powerful and sexually awesome and whatnot. What it's really about is having an active imagination and about blurring the lines between that imagination and reality. Scientific studies have shown that alien abductees DO blur the line between reality and imagination, according to the criteria of the fantasy-prone personality. Joe Nickell – an investigator, but I'm sure Dr. Jacobs would call him a debunker – reviewed the thirteen cases described in John Mack's seminal Abduction, and found that the majority of them fit the diagnosis. Dr. Jacobs is confusing the lay definition of fantasy with the technical definition provided for FPP.
As Michael Britt points out in his comment, some skeptics do have a knee-jerk "it can't be true because of reason X" reaction. But some skeptics, such as Dr. French, take a broader approach. They don't argue that one explanation fits all the evidence, they say that lots of explanations are needed, with a few overarching ideas (for example, media influence). Road hypnosis can't explain everything, sleep paralysis can't explain everything, but if you start adding up the explanations, pretty soon you've covered the vast majority of cases. Dr. Jacobs is setting up a strawman.
I still don't trust hypnosis. It's clear that Dr. Jacobs is shaping the memories over a handful of hypnosis sessions, which is why they start as “confabulations” and end with the same story. When you harp on something, in a disapproving, unbelieving tone, you shape their memories. You can't tell them straight out “You're a chicken” (starting 9 minutes into the video) unless they want to act like a chicken like with stage hypnosis. But you can mold memories. That's my armchair explanation of why the confabulations resolve, to please the hypnotizer. Especially revealing was this: when were were discussing hypnosis, he mentioned that disconfirming evidence that comes up under hypnosis – evidence that doesn't fit the narrative – is ignored until someone else mentions it. The problem is that he then says that the stories aren't idiosyncratic. Well, of course not, because he's ignored out of hand all the idiosyncrasies! He can't have it both ways.
Let's talk scars. People have scars, and they don't know how they got them, and they discover them all the time. Just a week ago, I found a scar in my bellybutton. I happen to remember that I had surgery a few years ago that went in through my belly button, but imagine if I had forgotten that. Or waking up with clothes on backwards. A few weeks ago, I took the bus to work, went around my business, and only near noon did I realize my shirt was on inside out. Isn't it possible that these people just put their clothes on incorrectly? In fact, that's a common theme I picked up from the interviews. Stuff happens to people, they can't explain it, therefore it's an abduction. It's the argument from ignorance: “We don't know what's causing it, therefore we know what's happening.” It's more complicated than that, with hypnosis and cultural influence, but that's a significant part of it.
Almost done. I want to talk about the depth of the evidence. When Dr. Jacobs was talking about the ghost phenomenon and how little knowledge there is about it, he mentioned where they get their energy, who they haunt, where they spend their down time, why they haunt some times and not others – all questions we could ask about the aliens! A common atheist line is that everyone thinks everyone else's religion is absurd. Maybe that's true of people who believe in the paranormal.
Lastly, the point skeptics hate to make: people lie. They do it all the time. They do it for any number of reasons. Dr. Jacobs admitted there were scammers and liars in the UFO abduction phenomenon, but he seems to imply that they're all easily discovered. I don't know one way or the other. What I do know is that people can hold very elaborate lies for very long times, regardless of what Law & Order says. Bill Clinton lied on national television for months about Monica Lewinski. Spouses lie for lifetimes about their illicit affairs. It's something that has always bothered me about self-report, one of the most common tools in social science research. For example, there was a pilot study conducted by a university research group in London that aimed to track how active children were. They gave the children pedometers that would track the number of steps they took. The researchers were shocked to discover that some obese children were extremely active. This finding contradicts all sorts of evidence showing the exact opposite: sedentary lifestyle leads to obesity. So what happened? The children were attaching their pedometers to their dogs' feet. The lesson: people lie. It's rude to accuse someone of lying without hard evidence, but I think it's reasonable to consider the possibility that someone who claims to have been abducted is lying.
A good place to start is to look at the comment left by Michael Britt, host of The Psych Files, another excellent psychology podcast, which recently celebrated its 100th episode. Congratulations, Michael! Michael notes that Dr. Jacobs sets up a dilemma where people who aren't as steeped in the scientific literature as he is shouldn't be taken as seriously as people who have devoted their lives to the area of research. The thing is, you're never going to find a critic of the alien abduction phenomenon that has devoted their life to it. There are researchers, such as Dr. Chris French, whom I interviewed previously, who have done some level of serious published research into the matter, but their knowledge is nothing compared to the stories Dr. Jacobs has. The reason that critics don't spend their lives studying the abduction phenomenon isn't because they are ignorant of the data, it's that they've examined the best data and found it lacking. Why study something without promise? For skeptics, it's just a few people who have weird experiences. It's of interest, but not of dire consequence for most. But for believers, it's a total world-changer; if we were actually being visited by aliens, I would be really tempted to make that my life's work too.
The second point Michael made that I wanted to discuss is about memory. Dr. Jacobs claimed that memory won't be heavily distorted in alien abduction accounts, because the time between the event and the reporting is sometimes days, or even hours. I'm taking a cognitive psychology class on the side, and we're just getting to memory research. The distorting effects of memory occur seconds after the event. There seems to be a lot of research about cars. For example, if we see a BMW and a Volkswagon Polo going the same speed, we're likely to remember the BMW as going faster, and this effect only takes a day to set in — and may increase over time. Elizabeth Loftus, in a four-page, very accessible article in Nature Reviews Neuroscience (PDF), points out many similar examples from real life. For example, people misreported the D.C. sniper as driving a white van, when this was not the case — and the witnesses gave their reports days or even minutes after reportedly seeing it. In short, Dr. Jacobs underestimates the malleability of memory.
I started having questions and objections from the beginning. I was talking with a tenured professor at a major university who has made his career, from his Ph.D. dissertation onward, defending the existence of the UFO and alien abduction phenomenon. He's edited and written several popular books. So it sounds disingenuous to me to say that it's all hardship to come out of the abduction closet as an intellectual. It seemed like an attempt to gain sympathy from me and my audience, and to establish his credibility using an argument from embarrassment, but for me it rang hollow.
Speaking of the argument from embarrassment, the first few minutes of the interview consisted of Dr. Jacobs explaining why the argument from embarrassment should give us confidence that the accounts of alien abductions are true. I've never found the argument from embarrassment very convincing, and all it could prove is that these people are honest and earnest in their statements — something skeptics like Dr. French don't doubt.
When Dr. Jacobs was talking about group abduction stories, where two or three people are able to confirm each other's stories, he's assuming that since this proves they aren't having delusions that that makes it true. It reminds me of the Salem Witch Trials, where a few teenage girls made up stories, and the lies got out of control. Dr. Jacobs would say that no one would ever lie about such an outrageous thing, but hey – the stories, true or false, are believed by many. And he could have used the same argument at the Salem Witch Trials.
I would also disagree with his description of fantasies as basically “happy places we can go in our mind” (my words, not his), and that fantasy-prone personality is when men indulge in feeling powerful and sexually awesome and whatnot. What it's really about is having an active imagination and about blurring the lines between that imagination and reality. Scientific studies have shown that alien abductees DO blur the line between reality and imagination, according to the criteria of the fantasy-prone personality. Joe Nickell – an investigator, but I'm sure Dr. Jacobs would call him a debunker – reviewed the thirteen cases described in John Mack's seminal Abduction, and found that the majority of them fit the diagnosis. Dr. Jacobs is confusing the lay definition of fantasy with the technical definition provided for FPP.
As Michael Britt points out in his comment, some skeptics do have a knee-jerk "it can't be true because of reason X" reaction. But some skeptics, such as Dr. French, take a broader approach. They don't argue that one explanation fits all the evidence, they say that lots of explanations are needed, with a few overarching ideas (for example, media influence). Road hypnosis can't explain everything, sleep paralysis can't explain everything, but if you start adding up the explanations, pretty soon you've covered the vast majority of cases. Dr. Jacobs is setting up a strawman.
I still don't trust hypnosis. It's clear that Dr. Jacobs is shaping the memories over a handful of hypnosis sessions, which is why they start as “confabulations” and end with the same story. When you harp on something, in a disapproving, unbelieving tone, you shape their memories. You can't tell them straight out “You're a chicken” (starting 9 minutes into the video) unless they want to act like a chicken like with stage hypnosis. But you can mold memories. That's my armchair explanation of why the confabulations resolve, to please the hypnotizer. Especially revealing was this: when were were discussing hypnosis, he mentioned that disconfirming evidence that comes up under hypnosis – evidence that doesn't fit the narrative – is ignored until someone else mentions it. The problem is that he then says that the stories aren't idiosyncratic. Well, of course not, because he's ignored out of hand all the idiosyncrasies! He can't have it both ways.
Let's talk scars. People have scars, and they don't know how they got them, and they discover them all the time. Just a week ago, I found a scar in my bellybutton. I happen to remember that I had surgery a few years ago that went in through my belly button, but imagine if I had forgotten that. Or waking up with clothes on backwards. A few weeks ago, I took the bus to work, went around my business, and only near noon did I realize my shirt was on inside out. Isn't it possible that these people just put their clothes on incorrectly? In fact, that's a common theme I picked up from the interviews. Stuff happens to people, they can't explain it, therefore it's an abduction. It's the argument from ignorance: “We don't know what's causing it, therefore we know what's happening.” It's more complicated than that, with hypnosis and cultural influence, but that's a significant part of it.
Almost done. I want to talk about the depth of the evidence. When Dr. Jacobs was talking about the ghost phenomenon and how little knowledge there is about it, he mentioned where they get their energy, who they haunt, where they spend their down time, why they haunt some times and not others – all questions we could ask about the aliens! A common atheist line is that everyone thinks everyone else's religion is absurd. Maybe that's true of people who believe in the paranormal.
Lastly, the point skeptics hate to make: people lie. They do it all the time. They do it for any number of reasons. Dr. Jacobs admitted there were scammers and liars in the UFO abduction phenomenon, but he seems to imply that they're all easily discovered. I don't know one way or the other. What I do know is that people can hold very elaborate lies for very long times, regardless of what Law & Order says. Bill Clinton lied on national television for months about Monica Lewinski. Spouses lie for lifetimes about their illicit affairs. It's something that has always bothered me about self-report, one of the most common tools in social science research. For example, there was a pilot study conducted by a university research group in London that aimed to track how active children were. They gave the children pedometers that would track the number of steps they took. The researchers were shocked to discover that some obese children were extremely active. This finding contradicts all sorts of evidence showing the exact opposite: sedentary lifestyle leads to obesity. So what happened? The children were attaching their pedometers to their dogs' feet. The lesson: people lie. It's rude to accuse someone of lying without hard evidence, but I think it's reasonable to consider the possibility that someone who claims to have been abducted is lying.
I tried. I really tried to believe it. How fantastic would it be to be visited by aliens? All the skeptics' questions could be answered. How did they get here? Well, we could ask them. In fact, I want to be abducted. I want so badly to get a chance to talk to these guys, to meet them and believe in them. I'm a science fiction dork, I would love it. But . . . . eyewitness testimony just isn't enough. No matter how hard Dr. Jacobs tried to say these witnesses were unimpeachable, I just can't buy it. Some physical evidence – a subdermal implant, a captured alien hybrid, anything. People are so susceptible to the variety of psychological phenomena that Dr. French discussed, so susceptible to false memories – and to telling exaggerated stories, and outright lies – that the rate of abduction stories, given the cultural influences, isn't a big shock.
Posted by Psyconoclast at 8/3/2009 9:30 PM 
Categories: uncategorized
Tags: memory science interviews with believers episode 5 psychology
Categories: uncategorized
Tags: memory science interviews with believers episode 5 psychology
Hi David. Thanks for the terrific podcast. I too have some problems with the work of Jacobs. However, if you get a chance you should look into the research done by Bill Chalker, particularly some DNA analysis done to a hair.
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Hi David, I'm glad to discover your podcast, have been a fan of Michael Britt's and David Van Nuys for a few months now and finally digging into some links. I wanted to add my take on this topic... The issue of proving or disproving is kind of not the point in my mind. People are free to, and will, continue to believe all kinds of things, whether that aliens do exist or not. You'll never get enough evidence to change beliefs. That's not how belief works. What can be debated and needs agreement on is so what do we, either as individuals or society DO if we believe one thing or the other. What is it that the alien abduction 'believers' think that other people should do or that society should do if what they say is true? What the non-believers say (most of whom have never even considered the question because it's so wacko - excuse my french) is do nothing. There is nothing that needs to be done in reference to these abductions. If what the abductees what is for others to believe their stories, they've got it! Other than that, they provide a wonderful laboratory, IMHO for studying psychological phenomena. It's kind of like when people ask me do I believe in god. My answer is that it's not whether one believes or not, but what does one mean when using that word. Obviously the word exists and it means something to a lot of people so it's not something that ceases to exist if one disbelieves in it. But what one means and why one believes and how that believe informs one's life is what is of interest and significance. But that's another topic. Thanks again and I'll keep listening. Oh, I did want to refer you to an interesting book that I think relates to this larger subject
Language and Self-Transformation: A Study of the Christian Conversion Narrative By Peter G. Stromberg
He's an anthropologist who's more recent and more popular book is Caught in Play. But I actually think this earlier book is more interesting in some ways. I think it offers an important perspective on how the stories people make of their experiences become meaningful to them and thus why they hold on to them so strongly. Cheers, Julia in Baltimore
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Jacobs believes that aliens are unable to reproduce themselves properly, so they are abducting our women and forcing them into a breeding programme intended to create human-alien hybrids who will eventually take over the world.
http://www.casinorevue.net
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