Thursday, July 24, 2003
From my CSICOP email newsletter:
CSICOP Fellow James Oberg forwards the following from Will Bueche - Center for Psychology & Social Change:
A feature article on the alien encounter experience, by Times writer Bruce Grierson will appear in the Sunday July 27th edition of The New York Times Magazine.** The article is not expected to be favorable towards experiencers of alien contact (though stranger things have happened).
The article focuses on a young Harvard researcher, Susan Clancy, who designed a memory experiment in an effort to disprove the validity of repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. For the experiment, she recruited subjects whose memories are, in her opinion, patently false: "experiencers" of alien contact.
The article is expected to highlight Clancy's remarkable resistance to criticism from researchers such as Dr. John Mack who believe that alien encounters are real, and from her Harvard Medical School colleagues who believe that traumatic memories are routinely repressed.
Interviews were conducted in Cambridge, Massachusetts earlier this year with Susan Clancy, her colleague Richard McNally, John Mack, filmmaker Laurel Chiten (of the documentary film "Touched"), some of the subjects who took part in Clancy's experiment and went on to speak out against her conclusions, and others from Harvard (the final article may or may not include all of these perspectives).
**Those wishing to get an advance look at the article should sign on to the New York Times website on the Friday before that Sunday's issue: the Times' website gets a head start on the print edition. Here is the direct link:
http://nytimes.com/magazine
Got that? "Victims of alien abduction" are being used by a researcher for a pool of people who's honestly held memories are, by definition, FALSE. Excellent. This, of course, does not please fellow Harvard researcher and alien abduction profiteer, John Mack, but that'll just be too bad. It seems to me that studying alien abduction "victims" is a very good way of studying the phenomenon of fabricated memories, like those of people who purport to have recovered memories of childhood sex abuse.
This sounds like a "two birds with one stone" type of research. Of course, the study relies on a presumption many won't accept - that alien abduction memories are false - but I'm glad to hear of some sense being excercised in academia.
The article should be interesting.
susan clancy is quoted in a letter to the boston globe expressing the view that"for children ,sexual abuse is rarely painful or terrifying at the time is occurs."i am a deputy district attorney who prosecuted child sexual abuse cases for over ten years.i can speak from vast experience about the trauma, pain , and terror child victims of sexual abuses experience, both at the time of the abuse and subsequently. how dare she express such an outrageous sentiment as fact. she is an idiot if she actually believes this crap and a discredit to harvard university.
It is amazing to me that the Harvard IRB allowed Susan Clancy to set up a human experiment that included the assumption that people who claim to be abducted aliens are obviously not credible witnesses. This is as unscientific and biased as unscientific and biased research gets, and yet they approved her research plan!