Sunday, January 16, 2011

Here and There . . .

Bird and other mysterious deaths continue to occur. Including one in Hollywood, California. Or did it? I comment on Animal Forteana.

Gary Haden continues his analysis and expose of David Jacobs; I respond to one of Haden's excellent articles (cross posted on Women of Esoterica) at UFO Mystic: Gary Haden at Speculative Realms: The Girl Who Saved Her Own Life. (A sub-title: Or, Why Aren’t We Screaming Mad About This?!)

When UFOs enter the mind during dreams and altered/trance like states, are these nudgings towards a remembering of actual events, or something else? I wonder at UFO Digest:Dreams and Meditations Bring Buried Memories of Encounters? (Speaking of dreams, I had a dream last night that a voice said to me I should pursue my dream journal Entering the Orb. Hmm...)

Blogsquachter is back, kind of. Link at Frame 352.

It's Not All Just About Me
Alfred Lehmberg comments on Dr. Mortellaro here  and on UFO Magazine's blog. 

Speaking of, very cool Paratopia has a magazine! Which includes Carol Rainey's article on Dr. Mortellaro, Emma Woods, Linda Cortile, and so much more... MUCH more, sure to shake up UFOlogy's regime just as Emma Woods has. Please read this article, everyone.

Lesley Gunter is busy as one of the coordinators of the Wake Up Now! conference in New Mexico in the spring. Wish I could attend!

10 comments:

Jeremy Vaeni said...

Actually, slight correction: Carol's article isn't about Montellaro. It's about Budd Hopkins. Jim is cited among examples of obviously bad cases in what Budd claims is a blemish-free record. The Linda Cortile case is also cited, for example.

Regan Lee said...

Jeremy, you're right, I'll reword that. that is a fantastic article by Rainey that covers so much -- so much! Like the Emma Woods "case," this is sure to be as enlightening, even though I'm sure there will be those who will see it as anything but, given past reactions to Emma Woods and the continued support Jacobs (and Hopkins) receive. Jeremy, you've done an excellent thing here. As has Carol, of course...

Jeremy Vaeni said...

I certainly hope so. We three (Carol, Jeff, and I) really worked hard at the Nth hour to get this right. And Dr. Kokjohn's follow-up is just perfect.

I think this may be the tipping point. I think it's too much to ignore after the Emma Woods scandal. I'm definitely moving into "feeling relief" mode where it's almost time to move on, having put this to rest. I'm probably jumping the gun but I can't wait to see what abduction research turns into. I don't think it's dead, I think it's just beginning!

Anyway, thanks for the kind words. The rest of the mag is gonna kick butt, too.

Regan Lee said...

I agree Jeremy, it is a beginning, not the end, not the demise of UFOs, etc. Only a shift, which is good.

And I see this as a continuation of Emma Woods; because of her willingness to tell her story, others are sharing their experiences.

Red Pill Junkie said...

I finished reading the article in question.

It certainly raised a whole lot of red flags. Not only about the appalling way in which Jacobs handled the Woods case; and not only about the questionable manner in which Hopkins conducts his research; but also about the intentions and objectivity of the author herself.

Let's just say I find interesting that after lambasting Hopkins' lack of objectivity and fuzzy investigative methods for 11 pages —even mentioning him as "an
artist whose brief, shining moment in the art
world passed over forty years ago." (ouch!)— Rainey finishes the article giving these credentials:

"She has also published short
stories, written feature-length screenplays and
teleplays, and co-authored the book Sight Unseen,
published in 2003 by Atria: Simon & Schuster.
www.carolrainey.com
"


'Co-authored' "Sight Unseen"? the reader might ask, co-authored with *whom*? Why, co-authored with Budd Hopkins, the same man he's accusing of twisting accounts and not checking his sources.

Am I the only one to find that a bit peculiar?

Emma@ufoalienabductee.com said...

Hi Red Pill Junkie,

I can easily understand why Carol Rainey wrote the article after having co-authored a book with Budd Hopkins. I know from my own experience that if you trust someone implicitly, and they are in fact very different to how you perceive them, that it can take a long time to understand that.

You do not necessarily just wake up one morning realizing what the actual situation is. Instead, you gradually come to understand of the reality over a long period of time. You can go through an extended stage of both being aware that there are problems, while at the same time still believing your original view of the person, and on a deep level you are working it out. It can take several years. People are complex, relationships are complex, and these things can take time.

Red Pill Junkie said...

Hello Emma,

You're very right that it takes longer for a person "on the inside" what may be as plain as day to outsiders, or people that are farther apart hey get to have a more objective and unbiased perspective. This is one of the many quirks of human nature.

So I could certainly understand if Rainey gradually began to question his former husband's methodology and conclusions as time progressed in their relationship.

However, I'm still trying hard to reconcile the "timeline" that can be more or less assessed, from both the reading of her article, as well as her public statements while interviewed by the Paratopia team.

For instance, there are these excerpts taken from the article:

"Several things about this case were making me increasingly uneasy. It wasn’t just the
pills and the pistol. Or the fact that none of Jim’s claims had been checked or verified.
Among his more mundane statements, Jim Mortellaro had earlier told Budd that he had two Ph.D.s (Really? That’s impressive, the
skeptical wife thinks from behind the camera. From which universities?) and that he’d been “the Marketing Director for Hitachi” before retiring early. (Really? Was that Regional, National or International Marketing Director? Why is it you don’t look or talk like any marketing director I’ve ever known?)

Actually, when I got honest with myself, it wasn’t just this case. A sick-in-my-heart feeling had been growing for some time. It was a festering unease about the way the alien abduction phenomenon had been developing before my eyes and captured through the camera’s lens for the last seven years of my marriage to Budd. A concern about what was truly being discovered during these hypnosis sessions and what was being manufactured—intentionally or not. And a mounting concern about the welfare of vulnerable people who had contacted Budd after reading his books or seeing him on television."


And later we find this:

[...]Instead, Budd and Jim together began to address the audiences of several popular paranormal radio shows, with Jim narrating his savage treatment by alien abductors and Budd playing an audio taped hypnotic regression session with a terrified Jim ailing and wailing at the aliens. This case, minus the audio, is now part of the publicly available record of abduction research at the BUFO Paranormal Radio website. On November 9, 2002, the Intruders Foundation hosted a New York seminar in its series called “Jim Mortellaro & Budd Hopkins, An Important New Abduction Case With Extensive Medical Evidence.” 13 Unfortunately, the only medical evidence was that hoped for, future evidence that would have to be made public by the upstate physicians when they’d completed their study of abductees.
That and the forged ER physician’s letter. I was too embarrassed and alienated to attend the seminar."


So the reader is left with the impression that the Mortellaro's case was the last straw that finally broke the camel's back, so to speak.

And then Rainey admits that the Mortellaro case broke during the time she and Hopkins were both writing their parts for Sight Unseen.

So I for one am still wondering: Is Rainey rejecting he entire corpus of Hopkins' abduction research... except that last book?

And let's not forget that Sight Unseen was published in september 2003. It's been more than 7 years. If Rainey truly believed her husband's and closest colleague were hurting people --deliberately or not-- with their investigation methods, why not coming out sooner?

Emma@ufoalienabductee.com said...

Hi Red Pill Junkie,

I think that it is what you said, in that when someone is on the “inside”, and has a strong belief about what a person is like, that it takes longer to see what is happening, even though it is as plain as day to outsiders.

I am sure that Carol Rainey began to see many signs that there were problems, but initially she would have discounted them, as she had a belief about Budd Hopkins that did not fit what she was seeing. It would have taken a gradual build-up of these things to start to break through that.

Over a period of years, there would have been a long time span in which she would have been both committed to her marriage and still believing in him, and trying on a another level to come to terms with the evidence that was slowly breaking through into her awareness that there were problems.

I think that is the explanation for the crossover in the timeline. She was both supportive of her husband and wanting to believe in his work, and at the same time, seeing things that were troubling and trying to reconcile it.

Until she finally made the break, she would have gone on the side of supporting her husband, even though at the same time she was starting to see the problems.

When she finally made the break, she was able to look back and see that she had been aware of it on some level for quite some time, but it had not come to fruition until she finally made the break.

Carol says that she was not intending to speak about what she knew during Budd’s lifetime. I assume that this was because she did not want to have a public confrontation with him, especially as he is ill.

However she says that she then heard about my case, which was a direct example of someone being harmed by this research. Ray Fowler made the public statement that he wondered how many other people there were like me.

Carol says that as she knew that there were others like me, that she decided to go public at that point. It was a case of an outside event, which was my case becoming known about in the field, that finally convinced her to speak out.

Red Pill Junkie said...

"Carol says that she was not intending to speak about what she knew during Budd’s lifetime. I assume that this was because she did not want to have a public confrontation with him, especially as he is ill."

This seems to indicate that (at the time, at least) she did not believe that her husband's research was potentially pernicious to the people he was investigating --otherwise her attitude was far too reckless.

And yet she publicly stated in the Paratopia interview (the free portion I was able to listen to) that she DOES believe Hopkins was fully aware of Jacob's procedures.

This is obviously a very complex and delicate issue, and one does not feel entitled to meddle into the private relationship of a (former) husband and wife.

And yet there's the thing we can speculate upon, the things she claims, and the things we can publicly verify. I'm just trying to reconcile all of it --and so far I must confess I'm experiencing a great amount of difficulty doing so.

Having said that, and as I already wrote on a previous occasion, I happen to agree on many of the conclusions she added in her article.

Like I said, this is not a clear-cut case --but then again, in the UFO field nothing is...

PS: And I'm still uncertain whether she does reject the whole corpus of Hopkins abduction research or not, whereas there are many people in the field who are not willing to do so --whether this is due to true conviction or just blind faith, I'm unable to answer.

Emma@ufoalienabductee.com said...

I suspect that when Carol heard the audio of Dr. Jacobs’ hypnosis with me that it really hit home to her just how damaging it was. She says that it galvanized her into action, and I can understand that.

As you say, it is a very complicated issue when you are talking about someone’s private life being bound up in it. You simultaneously have inside knowledge, but also inside blinders on. Sometimes it takes time away from a situation before your head is clear enough to understand what you witnessed and experienced really means. I know for myself that I am still working out what happened to me with Dr. Jacobs years afterwards.