Alien abduction and hypnotic regression - clinical trial?

[banditsat12oclock]

Hello,

Hypnotic regression (HR) is used as a tool in many alleged alien abduction cases, with many startling claims made.

Some "abductees" apparently become convinced that HR has uncovered real memories that were previously suppressed by the abductors, whilst other apparent "abductees" say that what they recall under HR might simply be coming from a combination of their imagination and all the UFO films or books they've watched/read.

I can see a lot of stuff on HR and past lives or NLP online, but I was hence wondering if anyone knew of any specific scientific studies into HR and alleged abductees, e.g.

1. Has anyone used HR and MRI to see if alleged abductees are accessing their brain's memory or imaginative areas?

2. Elsewhere, has anyone used HR for other traumatic events and been able to recover additional accurate details, e.g. from witnesses to terror attacks, victims of violent assaults, etc?

3. Has anyone tried to get test subjects to just go about their daily lives and then undergo HR to see if they can recall additional accurate details that they were unable to do consciously? Even in such mundane circumstances, do subjects start mentioning aliens or having lived as Marie Antoinette when all they've done is gone to the supermarket?

4. Has anyone studied whether driving long distances, particularly at night, is in itself slightly hypnotic? After many years of driving, I feel most people would admit to having had one or two experiences of almost "waking up" on arrival at a destination, but having little conscious recall of anything that happened on the drive there (especially if they were tired, distracted, thinking deeply about other matters, etc). Not that that's aliens, of course, but just that perhaps the combination of heat, motion, tiredness, and lighting are having an effect on their awareness and memory perhaps.

Thanks

 

[Ann K]

Elsewhere, has anyone used HR for other traumatic events and been able to recover additional accurate details

The devil's in the details, in this case the word "accurate". Absent physical evidence, hypnosis may sometimes be used in an attempt to get more details BECAUSE physical evidence is not available, thus the accuracy cannot be determined. Doesn't it still boil down to anecdotal evidence?

 

[Giddierone]

You could look at:
Recovering Memories of Trauma: A View From the Laboratory - McNally (2003)
Susan Clancy refers to a study which includes MRI scans of people given memory tasks, in her book Abducted (2005) the study is Neural evidence that vivid imagining can lead to false remembering Gonsalves et al (2004).
Also Elizabeth Loftus basically says false memories (i.e. those of alien abduction) look the same as real ones under lab conditions.
You could also look at Waking Hypnosis the kind John E. Mack used on subjects as young as 2 years old to "retrieve" abduction memories.

 

[Ann K]

Hypnotic regression compared with dreams:

Many persons who attach no importance whatever to their dreams–realizing that most of them are merely images of the dreamer's subconscious mind without correspondence to any other reality–nevertheless believe that whatever emerges during hypnosis can invariably be taken at face value. In fact, the state of a person during hypnosis resembles in many ways–although not in all–that of a person dreaming.

https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/resources/concerns-about-hypnotic-regression/

 

[Domzh]

Whenever I hear hypnosis I immediately think of all the countless reincarnations of Cleopatra and spartan war heroes wandering around.

Sorry...

Heres some real contribution:

...there is a raging controversy over the use of hypnosis to help people recall lost memories of early trauma. Many experts dispute the conclusion that such recovered memories are always real.

and

hypnosis, even self-hypnosis, can sometimes result in the creation of false memories -- the belief that something happened even though it never did. A psychologist at Ohio State University in Lima and fellow researchers found that even when people were warned about the possibility of acquiring pseudo-memories under hypnosis, more than a quarter of them did anyway.

source: https://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/10/us/hypnosis-may-cause-false-memories.html

This is backed by studies (mentioned in the source article) but there probably are also studies suggesting the opposite, as usual.

Heres a quote, of an abstract, of an article about scientific work (the mother of the daughter of the father...) done on this matter:

Our data point to quasi-spiritual motivations for why some people embrace the identity of alien abductee or past lifer.

source: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.5127/jep.017811


I actually found another paper discussing hypnosis and false alien memories, but its a scan and hard for me to read on my iphone mini. I still identified this conclusion extract:

They also correctly note that the
expectations of the hypnotist can be an important influence on subsequent recall.

Link to study: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327965pli0702_8journalCode=hpli20

This gives me some John Mack vibes and i wouldnt be surprised if people with certain pre-depositions (as suggested in above mentioned studies: lonely, victims of sexual abuse, want to believe in aliens etc) are more likely be drawn to hypnotists that are either "specialized" in alien abductions or were found within their social cloud of "true believers", which apparently would increase the likelihood of false memory recollection of abductions, as a direct result of a session.

 

[banditsat12oclock]

Thanks very much Ann K, Topbunk 2.0 and Domzh