Mod+ 231. Dr. David Jacobs Dismisses Spiritual Alien Abduction Stories

Getting back to the Dr. Jacobs interview, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, especially the part where the kind Dr. Jacobs elaborated on experiencer confabulation. One of the threats to his research, asked by Alex, was his own objectivity. I think that was questioned by statements he attributed to Dr. John Mack, which has been refuted by a number of sources. I have a wonderful interview here PBS Nova did in 1996 with Dr. Mack about his alien abduction research. Here, the eminent Dr. Mack maybe gets close to revealing his own notions about the role of consciousness raising in the human species.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/aliens/johnmack.html
 
Dear Ian, If there's an Alien breeding program the way you describe, why take so much time? Flying discs have been described throughout history. I'm familiar with the story your relating and it doesn't make sense following some basic ideas.
Hi Dmitch, I'm willing to play the game of playing the devil's (Jacobs') advocate. ;) But in order to answer you, I would need you to be specific about what doesn't make sense and in what ways. Preferably in specific point form so I can have a clear idea of where you're coming from.

It might take a little while for me to respond. I'm battling a wicked case of keyboard-itis.

@Alex (and K9), thanks for my liking my last post. I put a lot of effort already into exploring this material and into the various posts I've made on these threads. I don't expect to get any clarity anytime soon (read: ever), but I really like this topic. btw, I've just received Colli and Sixkiller Clarke in the mail. I've also got Mack, Strieber, Karla Turner and am waiting for 3 classics by Hopkins, the edited volume by Jacobs and one by Raymond Fowler. I will definitely eventually get to Passport to Cosmos and the Mary Rodwell book (and all the Vallee books). Just give me a few years to sort through this and all the other "psi" backlog I have. :eek:

Here are some good places to see recommendations for abduction books:
Jacobs:
http://www.ufoabduction.com/bibliography2.htm
http://www.ufoabduction.com/bibliography1.htm
Mike Clelland:
http://hiddenexperience.blogspot.ca/p/important-stuff.html (note the absence of Jacobs!)
His buddy Mac Tonnies:
http://www.mactonnies.com/lists.html
 
Last edited:
agreed.



sounds reasonable... but I just don't know. what about all those cattle mutilations?

as you allude to above, we have to accept that this extended consosiness stuff is just kinda strange... e.g. why do some people who expeirnece a NDE have incredible clarity... receiveing answers to any question that pops inot their head... even in subjects they know nothing about -- and, at the same time, have wildly different reports about the "reality" of the other side?
 
abductions so called abductions have been with us since we first kept records, ancient shamans were regularly taken up to the sky by beings and stones placed in there bodies, fairies did the same abducting people then taking them at times to caves and other times to cities, the modern phenomenon tied with the ancient seems to point to a supernatural phenomenon. All of the classic OBE symptoms appear in many abduction reports, strange diffuse light in the room, telepathic communication with the so called aliens, buzzing metallic clanking sounds, floating out of the room through material, people try to explanations as technology but considering the evidence it seems to me that whatever is abducted is non physical in nature. although there is the strange sexual aspect, the reproduction part, maybe its a bit of both , and then theres the implants, damn i just cant figure that part out, either way its clearly part of both realities, physical and non

There is so much more to thsi then jacobs narrow view. When alex brought up the astonishing fact that rick strammsans subjects were immediately volted out of there body and into contact with bonafide gerys he did int even bat an eyelid, that is astounding, and there are images of whta look like greys on cave paintings , presumably contacted through ayahuasca etc. Grahman hancocks book SUPERNATURAL simply must be read by anyone interested in all this.

even the paralysis that people claim the alients are doing to them could be interpreted as sleep paralysis, and sleep parallysis many times precedes the OBE, although one does not have to be asleep just extremely relaxed.

The consistency of the reports and the strange specificity of the consistencies precludes them form hallucinations , whatever they are!
its truly a strange phenomonon and seems to be tied to our conduct on earth somehow according to the reports.

Life is such a mystery, we abduct beings from one dimension(water) to another(air) and tag them, disect thema nd then drop them back and track them, remember that
 
agreed.



sounds reasonable... but I just don't know. what about all those cattle mutilations?

as you allude to above, we have to accept that this extended consciousness stuff is just kinda strange... e.g. why do some people who experience a NDE have incredible clarity... receiving answers to any question that pops inot their head... even in subjects they know nothing about -- and, at the same time, have wildly different reports about the "reality" of the other side?

good point alex, chris carter adresses this very succinctly in his book, imagine sending three differing people to africa, and asking them what thye saw, sure they all went to africa, but one would report pure desert , the other rainforest and the next karst rocky terrain , theres no mystery to me in that the levels of the next life are many and varied just as the physical world!.

and interestingly, reading the old literature on obes ndes spiritualism etc and even on ayahusca, we are told over and over that we are placed exaclty where we should be depending on our consciousness, our likes dislikes etc and attact liek minded individuals in the next life, i see it as very regulated, jsut as teh human body is, just as birth is a symphony of coinciding events regulated to a degree we cant even comprehend fully, a degree that makes you just stand in awe at that mysterious power that shaped you and brought you here. I see know reading why death shouldn't be as regulated and purposeful,
 
For those interested in the late Karla Turner (an abductee and later researcher/Ufologist) - check out the following well balanced and informative overview.


She too mentions the military involvement (underground facilities) and of course the underlying even to the point of prosaic uniformity across these experiences when they involve the greys in particular.

Even if in trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, we account for a large amount of cross-contamination from those merely with vivid imaginations and influenced by images so deeply embedded now in popular culture that they are mistaking the nature of their experience, my take on it is if 90% are explainable in mundane terms, this still leaves the hard core cases, the compelling 10% which like the UFO incident that occurred over Chicago's O'Hare airport in 2006, and was somewhat crassly denied by the FAA as anything but a rare weather phenomenon, these cannot so easily be dismissed.
 
abductions so called abductions have been with us since we first kept records, ancient shamans were regularly taken up to the sky by beings and stones placed in there bodies, fairies did the same abducting people then taking them at times to caves and other times to cities...

There is so much more to thsi then jacobs narrow view. When alex brought up the astonishing fact that rick strammsans subjects were immediately volted out of there body and into contact with bonafide gerys he did int even bat an eyelid, that is astounding, and there are images of whta look like greys on cave paintings , presumably contacted through ayahuasca etc. Grahman hancocks book SUPERNATURAL simply must be read by anyone interested in all this.

thx...agreed. I'm comming around to the idea that everthing (i.e. NDEs, OBEs, ETs, all extended consocisness expereicnes) is about a zillion times more complex than we normally imagine. I imagine a Amazonian geckos hanging out in the jungle saying, "you're not gonna believe what I saw over at the pond this morning" :)
 
Wow Alex . .just wow. That's my whole point - there are none!. What I have been positing is that the military explanations do NOT fit the facts.
you said:

This discussion seems to becoming another "my pet theory" carnival. Meaning that it seems to me many people are more interested in advancing their opinions than in genuine open-minded discourse. Of course there's also what I see as a weird thing - that the people involved have no experience with what they're discussing.

The latest PT I've read is that it's the US military. Well if so . .that means for starters that the military it operates freely across and without any regard for national borders, it also has very advanced memory-alteration tech. And it employs that tech in hundreds of ops a year all while managing to keep it secret. And given that there are reports of ET sightings prior to the modern era, they also have the capability to time-travel. Possible yes but to me, it's unlikely

I thought you were being a little too dismissive of the military component... there's a lot of good data behind some of those "pet theories". I think the military component is often ignored... or marginalized with goofiness... not to mention riddled with deliberate misinformation.
 
For those interested in the late Karla Turner (an abductee and later researcher/Ufologist) - check out the following well balanced and informative overview.


She too mentions the military involvement (underground facilities) and of course the underlying even to the point of prosaic uniformity across these experiences when they involve the greys in particular.

Even if in trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, we account for a large amount of cross-contamination from those merely with vivid imaginations and influenced by images so deeply embedded now in popular culture that they are mistaking the nature of their experience, my take on it is if 90% are explainable in mundane terms, this still leaves the hard core cases, the compelling 10% which like the UFO incident that occurred over Chicago's O'Hare airport in 2006, and was somewhat crassly denied by the FAA as anything but a rare weather phenomenon, these cannot so easily be dismissed.
she's very pursuasive... and her family to corroborated he claims. too bad she has passed.
 
[quote="alex.tsakiris, post: 5292, member: 1"
I thought you were being a little too dismissive of the military component... there's a lot of good data behind some of those "pet theories". I think the military component is often ignored... or marginalized with goofiness... not to mention riddled with deliberate misinformation.[/quote]

Hmmm . . I don't know why I'm getting so confused about your view on this. So you consider the military explanations valid? Because if so then we go back to the points I made which I summed up with "Possible yes but to me, it's unlikely" So either way I don't get it. Alright maybe we'll come back to this later
 
thx...agreed. I'm comming around to the idea that everthing (i.e. NDEs, OBEs, ETs, all extended consocisness expereicnes) is about a zillion times more complex than we normally imagine. I imagine a Amazonian geckos hanging out in the jungle saying, "you're not gonna believe what I saw over at the pond this morning" :)
So true, I feel. Just listened to your interview with the reincarnation of the Apostle Paul* ;) (I had never heard of this guy). I understood and shared to an extent your skepticism - but in the back of my mind, I kept saying to myself: but this guy kept getting repeated validation/confirmation, and from different sources, from different people (mediums) telling he was him - sometimes out of the blue. (And some of the stuff he was saying made some kind of possible plausible sense to me.) Like things can be both true and not true.

(* http://www.skeptiko.com/nick-bunick/
http://www.skeptiko.com/upload/skeptiko-122-nick-bunick.mp3 )

(p.s. you forgot to ask him why he buggered up Christianity with the Pauline angle if he is/was so much into the love-and-no-sin-or-hell thing :D)
 
Last edited:
"Bueche says the way he interprets the clues he's gotten, the beings may have inadvertently destroyed their planet and want to create a generation that's more in tune with spirit, and maybe need humans and their connection to spirituality (our empathy, etc.) to achieve that goal. In The Threat, Jacobs points to some abductee accounts and the notions that the grays were themselves the result of early hybridization experiments from a higher species (possibly the insect-like aliens who are always seen by the abductees to be on board the crafts with them, and probably with humans) that were imperfect and led the grays to not be able to reproduce anymore. Because we can reproduce, the grays can reproduce through us. (p. 130)".

Hi Ian, I enjoyed your info. Need to take some time to look at all of it. I prefer the Alex approach on this stuff. There's good enough (to draw us in) data on UFOs sightings, physical evidence, unintended Gov. disclosure docs, etc. There's the wealth of commonalities in experiencer reports. There's NDE data on the nature of consciousness and other dimensions of reality. I feel more comfortable with speculating how the 2 topics can be tied together. The ideas from Mr Bueche sound more like an episode of Ancient Aliens and the theories seem incongruent. A species of beings which have overcome the challenges of time and space, which is telepathic suggesting a much more profound understanding and mastery of consciousness then humans could imagine would not be here using us to fix a screw up, actually according to Mr. Bueche, 2 screw ups. I'm kinda going slow on this cause it's so easy to fall off the tightrope into the sea of confabulation.
 
There's NDE data on the nature of consciousness and other dimensions of reality. I feel more comfortable with speculating how the 2 topics can be tied together. The ideas from Mr Bueche sound more like an episode of Ancient Aliens and the theories seem incongruent. A species of beings which have overcome the challenges of time and space, which is telepathic suggesting a much more profound understanding and mastery of consciousness then humans could imagine would not be here using us to fix a screw up, actually according to Mr. Bueche, 2 screw ups. I'm kinda going slow on this cause it's so easy to fall off the tightrope into the sea of confabulation.

I understand your not wanting to drown ;) and I have issues with the problem of confabulation myself, although I think there's enough consistencies, especially those pre-dating the media popularization of these accounts (and possibly other evidence: missing time, etc.) so that confab cannot explain away the whole phenomenon. I guess at this point I'm comfortable enough to take all this stuff in and just let it stew there and sit as different possibilities.

Regarding Bueche, I cited him because I was surprised by these comments of his, his being a member of the PEER group. Earlier in the video doc I posted, he criticizes the strict realist approach of Jacobs and others, which he finds naive, but at the end he winds up, out of his own experience, providing some material that is in different ways congruent with those researchers (the physical beings, the hybrid program).

Regarding tying UFOs, possible aliens, and encounters, with NDEs and other psi/survival data, I agree with this post made on another thread by someone else:
Time and time again we have verified spirits who have related that "aliens" exist, that they are part of the afterlife. As far as I am concerned, that ends the question.
http://www.skeptiko.com/forum/threads/the-extra-terrestrial-hypothesis.255/#post-3806

I find there's (for me convincing) evidence for this in mediumship, OBEs and even NDEs. (Whether those beings are physical from other planets, ethereal/astral realm, "imaginal", etc., or all of the above, is another question.) "We" - i.e. who we really are, "souls" - choose to incarnate or exist in different forms/realms.

In one of her NDEs, PMH Atwater herself saw one of her previous lives as an ET (although she admits this happened when she was on medication and can't know what its influence was):

(W)hile lying on the sofa staring into space, there formed slightly above my chest an elevated “rainbow-type” arch like a misty bridge, and across that arch there began to parade a whole host of tiny people I came to realize were all my past lives parading by for review, ending with my existence as a lizard-like being from a water star which had gone nova in the Sirius System. This strange refugee to planet Earth eventually died, as did most of its kind, finding the atmosphere and living conditions here not as compatible as originally calculated. I strongly identified with the lizard being, feeling myself to be every bit the foreigner it was, and just as lost. This parade of life fascinated me and I studied each character carefully, noting the possible evolution of my own personality traits and how each came to be. These tiny characters were like fully animated holograms, totally real and alive yet like so much thin air. This parade also continued for the seven days I took the medication.
PMH Atwater, Coming Back to Life, p. 40

Deciding if space-time travel is possible (and if that is what is involved), if "smart" beings could do seemingly "dumb" mistakes, all those sorts of questions - I find them secondary to the "data" (accounts, UFO findings). I don't want our very limited present-day human filters to decide what may or may not be possible or real (including our understanding of what the physical universe is and what is possible - that sure has changed radically in a minuscule amount of time).
 
Regarding tying UFOs, possible aliens, and encounters, with NDEs and other psi/survival data, I agree with this post made on another thread by someone else:
http://www.skeptiko.com/forum/threads/the-extra-terrestrial-hypothesis.255/#post-3806

I find there's (for me convincing) evidence for this in mediumship, OBEs and even NDEs. (Whether those beings are physical from other planets, ethereal/astral realm, "imaginal", etc., or all of the above, is another question.) "We" - i.e. who we really are, "souls" - choose to incarnate or exist in different forms/realms.

http://www.leslieflint.com/ward261067.htm

Discarnate Stephen Ward was interviewed by Rosie Creet a Brit - who often sat with Flint - in the late 60's inquiring about UFO’s, life on other planets and planes of a higher energetics (vibration) invisible from our physical world.

Other spirits have also come through Flint’s seances speaking on ufology, Ward may be the best.

He stated from his personal knowledge that alien craft come from higher spheres occupied by superior beings, they come in peace, eager to help. Unfortunately, it is man’s density, general lack of wisdom, compassion, and open-minded spirituality that prevents an all-out contact, or public landing (on the White House lawn for instance).

I suppose the ultimate point is that there are physical and nonphysical beings who come to visit, they are very real and still to this day very mysterious.
 
When I heard the first interview, I really liked the way Jacobs sounded--a straight shooter, interested in the facts. But then after reading some of the articles recommended in the discussion thread, it all started to look disturbingly different to me. I also saw an interview with Jacobs on YouTube, and saw what I thought was a series of brief, not quite suppressed, very revealing emotions cross his face as I heard the same familiar voice. What started as hope in someone I could trust turned the other direction. I was relieved to see that the conclusion to the two-part interview was something similar.

In answer to Alex's question, I think everyone but the very unsophisticated knows that worldview makes all the difference. The fact that Jacobs seemed to not so much disagree with that, but not even get the point, is very troubling.

From my very minor acquaintance with the alien abduction field, it seems to me there are two ways to go: the Helen Wambach way and the Ian Stevenson way, to use past-life research as an analogy. Wambach used to regress groups of people hypnotically and amassed a lot of interesting data, with the punch line being more or less that consistencies and distributions (like, most people reported being poor) in the accounts amounted to positive evidence. Stevenson, in contrast, eschewed hypnotic regression, went with natural memories in children, and looked for physical corroboration of those memories. Rather than starting with surface indications and going inward, he started with the surface and went outward.

If I were an alien abduction researcher, I would go the Stevenson way--go with conscious memories and look for physical corroboration. That's why I find the Travis Walton case so compelling. And why the work of Dr. Roger Leir (the guy who removes metallic implants from abductees) seems promising. Going the other direction--burrowing into hypnotically acquired memories and looking for consistencies between the accounts--while interesting, seems to me the wrong way to go for trying to establish the reality of this phenomenon.
 
I thought you were being a little too dismissive of the military component... there's a lot of good data behind some of those "pet theories". I think the military component is often ignored... or marginalized with goofiness... not to mention riddled with deliberate misinformation.

Hmmm . . I don't know why I'm getting so confused about your view on this. So you consider the military explanations valid? Because if so then we go back to the points I made which I summed up with "Possible yes but to me, it's unlikely" So either way I don't get it. Alright maybe we'll come back to this later

I'm saying I don't know what part of the military explanation is accurate... but by contrast I'm suggesting that the, "military doesn't know anything more that we do" explanation is just as outlandish as the ones you mentioned.
 
I have the DSM-5, the American Psychiatric Association’s "bible", "a standard reference for clinical practice in the mental health field" - from the Preface, which came out in May 2013. The last, DSM-IV, was in 1994. There's a chapter in DSM-5, p. 715, Other Conditions That May Be a Focus of Clinical Attention, but they then say, “The conditions and problems listed in this chapter are not mental disorders” – important to bear in mind.

There’s a small section in this chapter, p.725, Problems Related to Other Psychosocial, Personal and Environmental Circumstances and under this section V62.89 (Z65.8). Religious or Spiritual Problem.

It goes, "This category can be used when the focus of clinical attention is a religious or spiritual problem. Examples include distressing experiences that involve loss or questioning of faith, problems associated with conversion to a new faith, or questioning of spiritual values that may not be related to an organized church or religious institution." In this 947 page work there is no mention of alien abduction experiences but this is the relevant section for them. Why?

Well, this is a whole book (I’ve just got this from Amazon) devoted to Religious and Spiritual Issues in Psychiatric Diagnosis: A Research Agenda for DSM-V (2011) also published by the American Psychiatric Association and has a section on alien abductions, p. 185-187. This is in Section 8 in DSM-IV Religious and Spiritual Problems by Profs. Lukoff, Lu and Yang.

http://www.appi.org/searchcenter/pages/SearchDetail.aspx?ItemId=2658#

What is in this Section 8? Let’s take the above wording, which is relevant, "questioning of spiritual values that may not be related to an organized church or religious institution" and into this they put mystical experiences, near-death experiences, psychic experiences, alien abduction experiences, meditation and spiritual practice-related experiences and possession experiences.

In the references to do with abductions are John Mack (Passport to the Cosmos -1999), N Spanos et. al., T Bullard, S Appelle.

However if you now Google DSM-IV Religious and Spiritual Problems you get a course run by Prof. David Lukoff with 9 references to John Mack (and Passport to the Cosmos) and I think is from 2000. This is also on the John E Mack Institute website.

Since DSM-IV Religious and Spiritual Problems with the alien abduction section is in this 2011 book Religious and Spiritual Issues in Psychiatric Diagnosis: A Research Agenda for DSM-V, therefore AA’s are a subject of present study (one would guess). At the end of each chapter of this book, two Commentary letters are given (which seem to be supporting letters) by other academics and two are given for Lukoff, Lu and Yang’s DSM-IV Religious and Spiritual Problems. I just think the first of the two is remarkable by Prof. Bruce Scotton (and he mentions UFOs), esp. this "If the purpose of spirituality boils down to the attempt to foster the ongoing development of human beings, an encounter with a more developed species would be an encounter with a spiritually evolved entity.” (does he know this I wonder?) Also he says alien encounters are a “nonpathological V code entry” and isn’t this what John Mack was saying all along, that there is basically nothing wrong, apart from post-traumatic, with experiencers? But I just think that WHOLE last paragraph by Prof. Scotton is very, very interesting and deserves careful reading.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...-IV religious and spiritual problems"&f=false

I’m sure these words are chosen very carefully and have a lot of meaning especially as abduction experiences have changed some people’s spiritual outlook on life. I think the above abduction section in “DSM-IV RSP” in Religious and Spiritual Issues in Psychiatric Diagnosis: A Research Agenda for DSM-V has “officially” vindicated John Mack in that his work is now part of mainstream science to do with psychiatrists helping experiencers who have undergone real events. I also didn’t find any references in the above to David Jacobs.

(Just with ref. to my previous comment on Dr. John B. Alexander’s book UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies and Realities and comments about John Mack he also says there is something physical as well to abductions.)

Finally if UFOs (UAPs) are real (i.e. basically aliens) and people are having encounters with them, what’s going on? What for? Why spirituality? How high up the “spiritual food chain” does it go? This all seems to be a vindication also of spirituality as non-pathological, alien encounter experiences as non-pathological (and spiritual/physical) and underwriting what Alexander says in his book, where he mentions, p. 249, “the commonalities between near-death experiences and alien abduction”.

So although the huge and new DSM-5 (2013) has a small section, just 4 lines, on Religious or Spiritual Problem, when you look closer at a related publication which has been out for two years there is research on abductions and courses being taught for professionals on this. In the light of all this I can’t understand why there’s a dismissal of spiritual alien abduction accounts.
 
In connection with abduction phenomena I wrote:
What seems to be at the essence of things and therefore worthy of study is how and why the military-industrial-intelligence complex is engaging in all this.
Alex replied:
I think that's a valid question... and might be the "essence of it", but I'm not sure we know that. The STE hypothesis would suggest that it is not the essence of it.
You seem to be using one hypothesis to invalidate another. Please be a little clearer, if you can spare the time.
 
Back
Top