Alien Abduction or overactive imagination?

I came across this artical when I opened my web browser. I found this part pretty interesting:

But reactions are also similar. There is often a period of amnesia following the alleged encounter. Then the "witness" will usually undergo a session of hypnosis, counseling or psychotherapy to recollect the details of their extraterrestrial event. Some even endure psychological tests, which rarely confirm that abductees are mentally ill.

Richard McNally, Ph.D., psychological researcher at Harvard University told Psychology Today, "These people are almost never psychotic. They're not lying."

In fact, researchers have found that the abductees believe in their experiences to the point that they exhibit the same stress symptoms other victims of traumatic events display.

McNally recorded individuals that claimed to have been abducted as they related their experiences to him. When the tapes were played back, the abductees showed the same physical responses that survivors of war would show.

"The heart-rate responses and sweating responses were at least as great in the alien abductees when they heard their memories of being taken and molested by space aliens and subjected to experiments as those of people with genuine traumatic events," McNally told BBC News.

Link

I don't know if this is common knowledge in the UFO community or not, as it is not something I am too familiar with, but at the very least soem of you can get to quote a Harvard researcher giving quotes to a Psychology magazine.

Unfortunately they also have a retarded and nonsensical conclusion attached to this research:

"The results underscore the power of emotional belief," he noted. "People who sincerely believe they have been abducted by aliens show patterns of emotional and physiological response to these 'memories' that are strikingly similar to those of people who have been genuinely traumatized by combat or similar events."

www.hno.harvard.edu...

I agree. However, I do understand why a Harvard researcher would want to put that in there to 'save their reputation". It is a shame they couldn't just go with a normal conclusion. Something tells me if these victoms were all child abuse cases, there would be no such footnote.

Originally posted by plop
Unfortunately they also have a retarded and nonsensical conclusion attached to this research:

"The results underscore the power of emotional belief," he noted. "People who sincerely believe they have been abducted by aliens show patterns of emotional and physiological response to these 'memories' that are strikingly similar to those of people who have been genuinely traumatized by combat or similar events."

www.hno.harvard.edu...

I don't see the retardness to this quote. He's simply trying to make us 'connect' this to the real world, saying that the symptoms imitate real life trauma symptoms. The example is examplary.