Archive of September 2008
2008.09.20
UFO Abduction Series: Parts IV and V
I decided to condense parts IV and V of the UFO debunk series since both are relatively small and required little explanation. Here are the last two symptom requirements:
4. “Seeing unusual lights or balls of light in a room without knowing what was causing them.” 5. “Finding puzzling scars on your body and neither you nor anyone else remembering how you received them or where you got them.”
The first one can be relatively easy to negate due to the second half of the sentence: without knowing what was causing them. Ignorance shouldn't count as a qualifier for a potential abductee symptom. Nor should it be used as one. There are a lot of things of which a lot people are ignorant, but that doesn't mean they were necessarily abducted, or that their chances of having been abducted are now greater.
Ignoring the second half of the sentence and just dealing with the first, there are a couple of reasonable explanations:
- Ball lightning, though controversial, is one potential candidate
- An aura, before a migraine
- An actual migraine
- Some sort of retinal injury, like a tear
- And, on the more severe end, multiple sclerosis
There are other causes, such as being smacked in the eye or the head, but there are too many to list. Most of the causes on this list indicate that the seeing of lights is hallucinatory in nature, due to something malfunctioning. "Flashes of light can be a symptom that just about everybody will experience at some time in their life. Seeing flashes of light can be one of the many annoyances that go along with an aging body," (mothernature.com).
The fifth symptom is, IMHO, completely ridiculous. Unless it's a surgical scar and you've never gotten surgery, and no one you know remembers you getting surgery, and no hospital has record of you getting surgery, and you're not secretly Jason Bourne with multiple identities and amnesia... well, then, chances are you ran into something, got a small cut, and didn't think it worth remembering. I have quite a few scars on my knees and arms--and I couldn't tell you how I got all of them. My only indicator is where they are: knees means I probably fell, arms means I probably hit something or ran into something.
This pretty much concludes my UFO series. If I left anything untouched, feel free to comment, and I'll address it right away.
Again, just so my position is clear (in case people haven't read the Part I of the UFO Series), I do believe the chances of there being extraterrestrial life are extremely good. In fact, I would be surprised if I ever found out that there did not exist other life in the universe. What I am doubting is the chances of said extraterrestrial life making it here to earth and then hiding from us instead of greeting us. Part I of the series has a more detailed explanation of my beliefs on the matter.