Your opinion of UFOs, ESP, poltergeists, etc?

[miamited]

Hi all,

Yes, it is true that most odd aerial sightings only happen once and it is therefore very, very difficult for anyone to try to explain what it might have been after the fact. This, of course, does complicate the matter and without anyone being able to give a sure explanation of the occurrence, allows many to then relegate the event to an other worldly craft sighting with about the same ability to make such a discernment as those who try to explain such sightings after the fact. It's just a supposition based pretty much on just 'that's what I want to believe about it'. But at best, it can only be a supposition unless there is some real factual data to support that the sighting was, in fact, an alien spacecraft of some sort.

God bless,
In Christ, ted

 

[miamited]

That's a new one for me! I hadn't noticed the similarity of rhyme and rhythm...

No, it's the name of one of Lewis Carroll's (Charles Dodgeson) portmanteau nonsense monsters from the poem Jabberwocky in Through The Looking Glass.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!” ​

Hi FB,

Goes to show that I'm not very familiar with a lot of the old classics. Thanks for the explanation, but yes, the rhyme and rhythm of the moniker immediately brought to my mind Benedict Cumberbatch, a fine actor. I truly enjoyed his portrayals of Sherlock Holmes and I also enjoyed his acting in the movie, I forget the name, where he figured out the German code machine. Oh yes, the Imitation Game. Thank someone for Google.

God bless,
In Christ, ted

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

... Unfortunately the sightings ended before they had the equipment operating. That's what we need to do if we want to understand UFOs. We could set up networks of cameras covering the entire sky all over the globe and run the data through image processing software to look for UFO-like lights. Then we might get somewhere.

I doubt it... I agree that more study would be useful, but I'd like to see resources assigned according to the likelihood of the options (i.e. the rational Bayesian priors).

Given that we already know that people commonly misperceive or misinterpret what they see, and tend to explain unusual observations in exaggerated and/or embellished form, and given that we have no reason (plausible evidence) to suspect that UFOs may be anything other than such misperceptions or misinterpretations, I would fund studies into how and why we often misperceive or misinterpret what we see, rather than trying to look for ill-defined, unknown, and unevidenced causes.

Experience shows that even seemingly incontrovertible accounts of non-human craft or paranormal activity UFOs can turn out to be mundane objects and events misperceived, so it should not be surprising that a few remain unexplained - but where a reasonable amount of evidence of the circumstances are available, and someone takes a hard look at it, they almost inevitably turn out to be mundane.

YMMV.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

... the rhyme and rhythm of the moniker immediately brought to my mind Benedict Cumberbatch, a fine actor. I truly enjoyed his portrayals of Sherlock Holmes and I also enjoyed his acting in the movie, I forget the name, where he figured out the German code machine. Oh yes, the Imitation Game.

He also does a solid job as Dr Strange in the Marvel superheroes franchise (I just saw Avengers: Infinity War, where he has a key role)

 

[miamited]

Hi FB,

Well, he certainly does a good portrayal of a certain obsessive compulsiveness in a lot of his acting. Kind of like the other current Sherlock Holmes on the series Elementary but taking black beauties (the drug folks, not any inference to black women).

God bless,
In Christ, ted

 

[Shadow]

What is your opinion of UFOs, ESP, poltergeists, etc? I realize that many people think these topics are laughable, but there are probably others who have experienced them (whatever they are). So what do you think is the explanation for this stuff?

I don't have a strong opinion either way but I assume that there may be a "naturalistic" explanation for them. That's purely a personal bias, but I don't see much value in trying to convince people unless it causes them harm or distress. Its not something I look in to very deeply.

 

[cloudyday2]

I doubt it... I agree that more study would be useful, but I'd like to see resources assigned according to the likelihood of the options (i.e. the rational Bayesian priors).

Given that we already know that people commonly misperceive or misinterpret what they see, and tend to explain unusual observations in exaggerated and/or embellished form, and given that we have no reason (plausible evidence) to suspect that UFOs may be anything other than such misperceptions or misinterpretations, I would fund studies into how and why we often misperceive or misinterpret what we see, rather than trying to look for ill-defined, unknown, and unevidenced causes.

Experience shows that even seemingly incontrovertible accounts of non-human craft or paranormal activity UFOs can turn out to be mundane objects and events misperceived, so it should not be surprising that a few remain unexplained - but where a reasonable amount of evidence of the circumstances are available, and someone takes a hard look at it, they almost inevitably turn out to be mundane.

YMMV.

I suspect the US government already has something like what I described (24x7 optical coverage of the sky from multiple locations feeding into image processing software).

I imagine a volunteer effort somewhat like MUFON. I don't know whether the cameras would find any UFOs, but even knowing that it does NOT work would be useful. Objectively real UFOs observed by humans should also be observable by cameras. If a human reports a UFO in an area where a camera does NOT show a UFO, then we know more about UFOs. In other words, we would know that UFOs are not objectively real.

 

[Sanoy]

A group is trying to send up a private satellite for surveillance called a cubesat. The only thing that has ever been caught on cameras so far are the clouds and light balls. Which is interesting given that deities of the ANE were said to ride on clouds, and angels were considered spirits of fire. The whole phenomenon is not new, it just has a new modern twist in it's form as a space craft.

I know when it comes to abduction it likely can't be surveilled. The person will just get up and turn the cameras off. They go into a hypnotic state, and turn off the cameras. Most abductions happen in the day, but even in the day these people just switch into this state and go right to the "abduction" site.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

If a human reports a UFO in an area where a camera does NOT show a UFO, then we know more about UFOs. In other words, we would know that UFOs are not objectively real.

Sadly, no. We would only know that one particular report wasn't objectively real, just as detecting one UFO fraud would only tell us that one was fraudulent. Claims about UFOs involve silent propulsion, radar invisibility, and even visual cloaking; it's simply not possible to falsify all such claims.

If you managed to demonstrate that all reports that could be checked turned out not objectively real, it would give high confidence that they were not objectively real - but we're already in that situation. So the onus on the UFO claimants is to provide convincing evidence to back up their claims.

Someone recently said that the ubiquity of mobile phones means almost everyone now carries a decent still and video camera, so you'd expect the number and quality of available pictures and footage to have soared compared to earlier times, so that it would now be beyond doubt if there really were objectively real UFO phenomena - but that hasn't happened.

 

[cloudyday2]

A group is trying to send up a private satellite for surveillance called a cubesat. The only thing that has ever been caught on cameras so far are the clouds and light balls. Which is interesting given that deities of the ANE were said to ride on clouds, and angels were considered spirits of fire. The whole phenomenon is not new, it just has a new modern twist in it's form as a space craft.

I know when it comes to abduction it likely can't be surveilled. The person will just get up and turn the cameras off. They go into a hypnotic state, and turn off the cameras. Most abductions happen in the day, but even in the day these people just switch into this state and go right to the "abduction" site.

It is hard for me to take abduction reports seriously. At least with a typical UFO report the witness has a conscious memory. With abductions the memory is usually retrieved through hypnotic regression, so that adds an extra layer for potential error. Sometimes there is a conscious memory of a UFO sighting or lost time that prompts the witness to seek hypnotic regression. I read a book about the "The Allagash Abductions" by Raymond Fowler that was kind of interesting.

Installing cameras in the homes of repeat abductees could still be helpful. For example, if the people report abductions and the cameras oddly malfunction on those nights consistently then that is some interesting evidence.

 

[cloudyday2]

Sadly, no. We would only know that one particular report wasn't objectively real, just as detecting one UFO fraud would only tell us that one was fraudulent. Claims about UFOs involve silent propulsion, radar invisibility, and even visual cloaking; it's simply not possible to falsify all such claims.

If you managed to demonstrate that all reports that could be checked turned out not objectively real, it would give high confidence that they were not objectively real - but we're already in that situation. So the onus on the UFO claimants is to provide convincing evidence to back up their claims.

Someone recently said that the ubiquity of mobile phones means almost everyone now carries a decent still and video camera, so you'd expect the number and quality of available pictures and footage to have soared compared to earlier times, so that it would now be beyond doubt if there really were objectively real UFO phenomena - but that hasn't happened.

I was talking to a photographer about this issue. When I saw a UFO, I had a Nikon camera handy with a zoom lens, but I knew from experience that my lens wasn't going to be able to see the object. The human eye can see more than most cameras.

Another issue is the default image compression of most digital cameras. Apparently it is impossible to authenticate a photograph without the unmodified RGB value of each pixel. Some cameras have a "raw" mode, but I doubt if the average phone has this feature.

And finally there is the photoshop problem. There are so many people who think it's funny to make UFO hoaxes and the technology makes that so much easier

Ironically the situation seems to be worse now that we have phone cameras instead of the old fashioned cameras with film.

BTW, I don't know for certain what my UFO was. It might have been a hallucination or something uninteresting like a helicopter or a drone.

 

[Sanoy]

It is hard for me to take abduction reports seriously. At least with a typical UFO report the witness has a conscious memory. With abductions the memory is usually retrieved through hypnotic regression, so that adds an extra layer for potential error. Sometimes there is a conscious memory of a UFO sighting or lost time that prompts the witness to seek hypnotic regression. I read a book about the "The Allagash Abductions" by Raymond Fowler that was kind of interesting.

Installing cameras in the homes of repeat abductees could still be helpful. For example, if the people report abductions and the cameras oddly malfunction on those nights consistently then that is some interesting evidence.

I don't believe the abductees story entirely either but there are things going on in the physical sense that are sort of attached to the experience. Like one had this device hooked up to him and warts appeared all around the location, another is told not to touch a ship and then he does and warts appear, others come back with scoop marks, foreign particles embedded in their body, phantom pregnancies that test positive, and large scars of wounds that were not there the day before. Some even come back with clothing they don't own, and it's put on backwards. Whatever they are reporting as happening doesn't seem to be happening, but then something is happening to them at the same time. I don't know what to do with it. It's like a hallucination that is being manually induced in the person while something real is happening to them.

 

[cloudyday2]

I don't believe the abductees story entirely either but there are things going on in the physical sense that are sort of attached to the experience. Like one had this device hooked up to him and warts appeared all around the location, another is told not to touch a ship and then he does and warts appear, others come back with scoop marks, foreign particles embedded in their body, phantom pregnancies that test positive, and large scars of wounds that were not there the day before. Some even come back with clothing they don't own, and it's put on backwards. Whatever they are reporting as happening doesn't seem to be happening, but then something is happening to them at the same time. I don't know what to do with it. It's like a hallucination that is being manually induced in the person while something real is happening to them.

My brother-in-law is a hypnotherapist. At one time I suspected that something had happened to me to cause me to have a nervous breakdown a few years back, and that this memory was somehow suppressed. I was flirting with the idea of being hypnotized to retrieve the memory, but my brother-in-law told me the whole concept of hypnotic regression is bogus.

So a good first step on abductions would be to stop using hypnotic regression. If there is missing time and the person can't remember then that is our data set. If we can't do anything with that data, then too bad.

BTW, the warts you are thinking about may be from the Betty and Barney Hill Abduction. That is one of the most famous abduction cases, but as I read everything I could find about the case I gradually became more skeptical. One UFO investigator who interviewed Betty described her as imagining every street light to be an alien spacecraft. I saw an interview of Betty just before she went to a nursing home, and she appeared pretty imbalanced. She claimed to have seen UFOs hundreds of times and so forth. Apparently Barney was much more skeptical about the UFO explanation than his wife. IDK ... It's like @FrumiousBandersnatch mentioned earlier in this thread. Many of the UFO and paranormal cases don't look so persuasive when you dig deeper. Whenever I hear about some fascinating case, I typically google "case X skeptic" or "case X fraud" or "case X debunked" and learn to my disappointment that the case isn't so fascinating after all.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

I was talking to a photographer about this issue. When I saw a UFO, I had a Nikon camera handy with a zoom lens, but I knew from experience that my lens wasn't going to be able to see the object. The human eye can see more than most cameras.

The problem is not the eye itself, but visual system as a whole. The eye isn't used like a camera (partly because the brain can't handle the amount of raw data available from the retina). The data is partially processed by the retina, and only about 10% goes up the optic nerve to the lateral geniculate nucleus, where it's corrected for distortions, blind spots, etc., processed for depth, salience, etc. Then it passes up the layers of the visual cortex where various visual features are identified. At each stage, processing is influenced by expectation information from our internal model.

The end result of all that visual processing is compared with our internal prediction of the scene, and if necessary, used to correct it. It is this corrected prediction that we are conscious of - that is what we 'see', not a direct image of the world. And it's corrected by a significantly lossy interpretive analysis of information from the eye.

Optical illusions show us that errors in analysis are possible at every stage of the visual pathway. The brain is constantly making predictive guesses, and when something unexpected appears, it attempts a best-fit interpretation, which can result in significant errors, such as misinterpreting clouds as stationary when they're moving, and seeing venus as a close object moving fast because it seems to be moving relative to the clouds.

Once an incorrect interpretation is integrated into our internal model, it takes strongly contradictory information to correct it.

There are so many people who think it's funny to make UFO hoaxes and the technology makes that so much easier

Ironically the situation seems to be worse now that we have phone cameras instead of the old fashioned cameras with film.

But as I said, despite all that, and the ubiquity of phone cameras, we haven't had the huge increase in the number and quality of UFO images and video that we'd expect if they were objectively real - the number of reports has actually reduced (see Why have we stopped seeing UFOs?).

 

[Sanoy]

My brother-in-law is a hypnotherapist. At one time I suspected that something had happened to me to cause me to have a nervous breakdown a few years back, and that this memory was somehow suppressed. I was flirting with the idea of being hypnotized to retrieve the memory, but my brother-in-law told me the whole concept of hypnotic regression is bogus.

So a good first step on abductions would be to stop using hypnotic regression. If there is missing time and the person can't remember then that is our data set. If we can't do anything with that data, then too bad.

BTW, the warts you are thinking about may be from the Betty and Barney Hill Abduction. That is one of the most famous abduction cases, but as I read everything I could find about the case I gradually became more skeptical. One UFO investigator who interviewed Betty described her as imagining every street light to be an alien spacecraft. I saw an interview of Betty just before she went to a nursing home, and she appeared pretty imbalanced. She claimed to have seen UFOs hundreds of times and so forth. Apparently Barney was much more skeptical about the UFO explanation than his wife. IDK ... It's like FrumiousBandersnatch mentioned earlier in this thread. Many of the UFO and paranormal cases don't look so persuasive when you dig deeper. Whenever I hear about some fascinating case, I typically google "case X skeptic" or "case X fraud" or "case X debunked" and learn to my disappointment that the case isn't so fascinating after all.

Barney was skeptical of the initial sighting while it happened, thinking it to be an airplane, but afaik not skeptical after the trip. It's his personal account that actually solidified the alien gray experience. After that everyone started seeing grays. It was one of those trigger moments like the Kenneth Arnold radio interview that triggered a shift in how people experience alien craft. After his sighting was erroneously described as a flying saucer people began experiencing saucers. But Barney's regression contradicted Betty's, so anything could have been happening during those missing hours. She definitely went crazy, whatever she experienced, real or unreal, was enough to make anyone crazy. Her husband appeared to be sound. It seems in all of these events, abduction or UFO experiences, expectation shapes the reality. But there is also some real factor, hidden like the wizard of OZ, behind the image on the screen.

I think what makes regression interesting is that it's like a dream, and you can see these pieces of actual events go into it, like the outer limits episode of 'gray' like aliens that may have given form to the creatures in Barneys experience. When you lay out a stack of abductee reports you start to see structures and forms like the frame work of a building, where the frame work of the building is the same for every person but not the furniture, the lights or the color of the walls. If you set them in chronological order you also start to see developments that emerge across the board and show up in all of the accounts. One decade the aliens are doing one thing, and the next decade they are doing something that the prior decade led up to. What is interesting is this frame work, the part that everyone experiences, for example the rooms never have corners, it's always a round room.

The whole pursuit of UFO/Abduction cases really is like a hunt for the wizard of OZ. The experiences are so vastly different in both that no mythos can be formed from the experiences. I think the way to go is to look behind the curtain, to see the UFO and Abduction as a projection from something else. Tom Delonge says they are gods, which actually makes a lot of sense given the Apkallu from Sumeria, Assyria, and Bablyonia, and the fact that they can be whatever we expect them to be. The Bible and second temple Jewish texts does describe other adversarial Elohim, which in this case can be understood as fallen angels. A lot of these 2nd temple texts are very reminiscent of the phenomenon.

As Bandersnatch said only 10% of what is reported by the retina is reaching the mind. That data is then reinterpreted into an ''experience" of the world. Every day of our lives we are hallucinating a perception of reality. What if you could hijack the hallucination we call the experience of reality? You know those heist movies where someone swaps the surveillance cameras with a prerecorded loop? If something is truly happening here, that is what I think is occurring. That the image feed our consciousness is being given is switched over to a fabricated image, to cloud the reality of what is actually happening. If we already hallucinate reality, then someone who can hijack that hallucination can cause us to experience anything as reality. That is essentially what LSD does randomly. I think the same mechanism is utilized with all such supernatural experiences. Think of Elisha whose eyes were opened to see the spiritual army before him. Did God change the nature of his eyeballs or did he allow his mind to perceive a fuller picture of reality at this point of intersection between the consciousness and the projected reality that the consciousness witnesses.

Hopefully that wasn't long-winded, this is just a very interesting subject to me.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

It's his personal account that actually solidified the alien gray experience. After that everyone started seeing grays. It was one of those trigger moments like the Kenneth Arnold radio interview that triggered a shift in how people experience alien craft. After his sighting was erroneously described as a flying saucer people began experiencing saucers.

Yep, people tend to interpret what appear to be unusual things according to their expectations and the availability heuristic (recent or striking memories related to the situation at hand).

She definitely went crazy, whatever she experienced, real or unreal, was enough to make anyone crazy.

Do you know that she wasn't 'crazy' already?

But there is also some real factor, hidden like the wizard of OZ, behind the image on the screen.

Do you mean people's tendency to misperceive, misinterpret, imagine, and confabulate things, or something else? if something else, what did you have in mind?

If you set them in chronological order you also start to see developments that emerge across the board and show up in all of the accounts. One decade the aliens are doing one thing, and the next decade they are doing something that the prior decade led up to.

You'd expect that if people's interpretations were based on the most recent stuff they'd heard or read, and the media are looking for novelty.

What is interesting is this frame work, the part that everyone experiences, for example the rooms never have corners, it's always a round room.

Where did you get that information from? What % of people making these reports mention the shape of the room?

Tom Delonge says they are gods, which actually makes a lot of sense given the Apkallu from Sumeria, Assyria, and Bablyonia, and the fact that they can be whatever we expect them to be.

The fact that 'they can be whatever we expect them to be' suggests that they're products of our imagination; why introduce unspecified, ill-defined, unevidenced entities at all?

If we already hallucinate reality, then someone who can hijack that hallucination can cause us to experience anything as reality. That is essentially what LSD does randomly.

No, LSD doesn't 'hijack' our perceptual reality, it basically 'takes the brakes off' the mechanisms that generate it by reducing the suppression of some pathways. It's the same processes, but with a lot more cross-talk.

There's just no way to 'hijack' those processes without physically interfering with the brain neurons. The only external force with sufficient range and strength to influence them is electromagnetism, and the skull makes an effective insulator; only TMS can produce localised effects, and that's pretty crude and requires huge magnetic pulses.

Think of Elisha whose eyes were opened to see the spiritual army before him. Did God change the nature of his eyeballs or did he allow his mind to perceive a fuller picture of reality at this point of intersection between the consciousness and the projected reality that the consciousness witnesses.

If the story of what he saw is true, he probably hallucinated it. These kinds of hallucinations occur more often than most people think (I recommend Oliver Sacks' book 'Hallucinations'). It seems redundant to speculate about unexplained or inexplicable causes when there's no evidence for them and an entirely plausible - albeit mundane - explanation is available.

 

[Sanoy]

Yep, people tend to interpret what appear to be unusual things according to their expectations and the availability heuristic (recent or striking memories on, or related to, the situation at hand).

Do you know that she wasn't 'crazy' already?

Do you mean people's tendency to misperceive, misinterpret, imagine, and confabulate things, or something else? if something else, what did you have in mind?

You'd expect that if people's interpretations were based on the most recent stuff they'd heard or read, and the media are looking for novelty.

Where did you get that information from? What % of people making these reports mention the shape of the room?

The fact that 'they can be whatever we expect them to be' suggests that they're products of our imagination; why introduce unspecified, ill-defined, unevidenced entities at all?

No, LSD doesn't 'hijack' our perceptual reality, it basically 'takes the brakes off' the mechanisms that generate it by reducing the suppression of some pathways. It's the same processes, but with a lot more cross-talk.

There's just no way to 'hijack' those processes without physically interfering with the brain neurons. The only external force with sufficient range and strength to influence them is electromagnetism, and the skull makes an effective insulator; only TMS can produce localised effects, and that's pretty crude and requires huge magnetic pulses.

If the story of what he saw is true, he probably hallucinated it. These kinds of hallucinations occur more often than most people think (I recommend Oliver Sacks' book 'Hallucinations'). It seems redundant to speculate about unexplained or inexplicable causes when there's no evidence for them and an entirely plausible - albeit mundane - explanation is available.

I don't know what her mental state was before, but she appears unhinged after it.

I don't know whats behind the curtain, it could natural or it could be a mind. I don't have a "razor" that upon seeing a delimna, I assume a natural hypothesis. I prefer to think abductivley toward a hypothesis.

This stack I am referring to comes from a professor (David Jacobs) that compiled these regressions privately. So they were not yet publicly disclosed. The corners comes from his collection of around 150 patients. There are others, like John Mack, that came to believe their patients story because of these little internal structures.

Telling me that Elisha hallucinated the angels doesn't tell me anything. It's just a statment that it didn't happen, it's not an explanation of what happened. This book isn't going tell me what happened either, it's only going to speculate to form the conclusion that it didn't happen. That's not valuable to me, the rendalsham debunk is the kind of thing I find valuable. I personally just don't feel any epistemic duty to a naturalistic world view.

 

[cloudyday2]

The problem is not the eye itself, but visual system as a whole. The eye isn't used like a camera (partly because the brain can't handle the amount of raw data available from the retina). The data is partially processed by the retina, and only about 10% goes up the optic nerve to the lateral geniculate nucleus, where it's corrected for distortions, blind spots, etc., processed for depth, salience, etc. Then it passes up the layers of the visual cortex where various visual features are identified. At each stage, processing is influenced by expectation information from our internal model.

The end result of all that visual processing is compared with our internal prediction of the scene, and if necessary, used to correct it. It is this corrected prediction that we are conscious of - that is what we 'see', not a direct image of the world. And it's corrected by a significantly lossy interpretive analysis of information from the eye.

Optical illusions show us that errors in analysis are possible at every stage of the visual pathway. The brain is constantly making predictive guesses, and when something unexpected appears, it attempts a best-fit interpretation, which can result in significant errors, such as misinterpreting clouds as stationary when they're moving, and seeing venus as a close object moving fast because it seems to be moving relative to the clouds.

Once an incorrect interpretation is integrated into our internal model, it takes strongly contradictory information to correct it.

On a road trip I stopped and snapped pictures of some deer in a field with my 20X zoom and tripod. When I later looked at the pictures, I was surprised that the deer that I could clearly see with my naked eye looked more like indistinct rodents LOL. To take a picture of a somewhat distant UFO that looks like anything interesting would require a very large and expensive zoom lens. I don't think a cell phone camera is going to get anything unless the UFO is 100 feet away or something.

But as I said, despite all that, and the ubiquity of phone cameras, we haven't had the huge increase in the number and quality of UFO images and video that we'd expect if they were objectively real - the number of reports has actually reduced (see Why have we stopped seeing UFOs?).

I guess I'm not convinced that UFO reports have reduced. There is no longer a centralized authority for UFO reports in the US with the Blue Book closed, so there is no way to measure the volume of sightings. MUFON's website has a "latest reports" page that I used to read every morning. There are probably 20 reports per day and maybe a couple of them are interesting.

Another consideration is the end of the Cold War. There is probably a lot less military air traffic in the UK to generate misidentifications.

 

[cloudyday2]

If the story of what he saw is true, he probably hallucinated it. These kinds of hallucinations occur more often than most people think (I recommend Oliver Sacks' book 'Hallucinations'). It seems redundant to speculate about unexplained or inexplicable causes when there's no evidence for them and an entirely plausible - albeit mundane - explanation is available.

FWIW I read "Hallucinations", but I later read that the examples Sacks describes are exaggerated to make the book more interesting. Apparently some people in that field are critical of the book and author.

I might be an example of a person who hallucinates occasionally while still being functional 99.9% of the time. One of the reasons I have wondered if my experiences were truly hallucinations is that I was basically normal aside from brief experiences that might last a few seconds to a few minutes. Most people who hallucinate can't function without anti-psychotic medications, but I never missed a day of work and nobody knew I was having hallucinations/experiences except me and my priest at the time.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

I prefer to think abductivley toward a hypothesis.

Based on what?

This stack I am referring to comes from a professor (David Jacobs) that compiled these regressions privately. So they were not yet publicly disclosed. The corners comes from his collection of around 150 patients. There are others, like John Mack, that came to believe their patients story because of these little internal structures.

One has to be very careful with individuals in a suggestible state to avoid leading questions, suggestions, or selective focus on topics of the researcher's interest. Various 'recovered memory' scandals have established that. Until the session recordings are made public, I would reserve judgement.

Telling me that Elisha hallucinated the angels doesn't tell me anything. It's just a statment that it didn't happen, it's not an explanation of what happened.

It's not a statement that anything didn't happen, it's a plausible explanation for the reported event in as much as it's a well-known phenomenon that many people experience in a variety of contexts.

If you saw a tree split and scorched, would you reject lightning as an explanation in favour of aliens with rayguns or some unknown entity with a hidden agenda?

I personally just don't feel any epistemic duty to a naturalistic world view.

It's not so much a question of naturalism, it's a question of the best known fit to the observation. You can 'explain' anything with vague references to the unknown or paranormal, but that's called superstition.