hidden experience: UFO Journalist Roger Marsh ignores abduction reports: Okay, here’s my beef...Timely blog post by Mike -- I just wrote about the importance of researching all the data. This seems so damn obvious and I've been ranting about it for so long I often feel silly for bringing it up, and yet, this current episode with Marsh occurs, reminding us that the need to remind everyone it is dishonest, for one, to reject and trivialize the parts you don't like.
The abduction aspect is being marginalized within the UFO research community. This is an absolute truism, and both Roger Marsh and MUFON are towing that line. They seem to be wishing this aspect of the phenomenon would just go away. Wouldn’t it be so much better if it was all just lights in the sky?
What Marsh said was this:
"Okay, if it's my personal feelings, there may be one section of the listening audience that maybe follow alien abductions, I kind of have to push that aside." [Marsh]As Mike Clelland writes, it is very troubling that a self-described NY Times caliber reporter and MUFON member to boot be so glib when it comes to parts of the UFO phenomena.
7 comments:
We accuse professional skeptics of confirmation bias, and yet people in the paranormal field are guilty of the same thing. Heaven forbid we entertain the possibility that little non-human entities like to mess around with folks on their bedrooms, lest we miss our chance of receiving that call from the NYT!
Also, I personally rarely like to link things from The Examiner to TDG. I happen to have higher standards ;)
I am not actually angry at him or anything, I am more annoyed at the way "conservative" UFO researchers put blinders on and desperately want the approval from the mainstream.
Here's a bad analogy.
What if all the apostles walked around the desert and talked about their old pal Jesus. They would say he was a nice guy, he told some cool stories on a hill - but - good grief, don't mention the virgin birth or the rising from the dead! We need to be respectable.
Like the Jefferson Bible, right? The one purged from all the 'miracles' with only Jesus given moral advice to follow.
I admit I'm at a loss. On the one hand I cringe when with TV programs talking about UFOs --case in point, Joe Rogan's-- they focus in the people with the wackier claims. On the other hand, it also rubs me the wrong way when they show the purely materialistic approach to the phenomenon --"UFOs are metal cans piloted by scientists from another planet."
I guess I'm a natural-born Contrarian :P
rpj: I go through the same -- on the one hand, tales of sex with reptilian overlords, I mean... yet, the Joe Rogan's and msm and all that, not to mention the uber-debunkers -- yet.. and then... but there's ...
That's why I go back to my folklore training; collecting the stories. Focusing on the witness, and her or his own story. Wild crazy as those stories might be, we have to listen and consider. Then I have my own odd experiences that I realize invite, from some, disbelief if not outight derision.
Yeah, it's like what yo find in NDE research: some folks collect the stories from the people claiming the experience --tunnel of light, meeting dead friends & relatives, etc etc-- and then some lab manages to recreate ONE single aspect of it, like for example feeling your consciousness float out of your body; next thing you know, ALL skeptics go and yell in unison "NDE EXPLAINED BY SCIENCE!"
Unless you take into consideration ALL aspects of the experience, then you're just deluding yourself into thinking you have advanced one iota into understanding what it actually is.
PS: Mike will dig the fact your answer was posted @ 12:34 :P
Perhaps now more than ever we need to encourage and rely upon the self-described abductee (or experiencer) who's also an investigator. The late Karla Turner did this with great success and insight years ago, if only for a few years before her life was cut short.
If abductions (and we don't really know for sure what they are) seem to be pushed back into the 'ghetto' section of ufology there's no other choice but to ignore people like Marsh, MUFON (CUFOs - which also now abstains from abduction research).
~ Susan
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