Integration: Exclusive Interview with David M. Jacobs, Ph.D.
David M. Jacobs Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of History at Temple University (Retired), specializing in 20th century American history and culture. He was granted his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1973, in the field of intellectual history. He also teaches a regular curriculum university course on UFOs: "UFOs and American Society", a course that has been running for over 25 year.
Dr Jacobs began researching UFOs in the mid-1960s, his first book 'The UFO Controversy in America' (1975), was essentially a revised version of his doctoral dissertation and is widely regarded as essential reading. In 1982 he met the late UFO abduction researcher and pioneer Budd Hopkins and following several years of tutelage carried out his first hypnotic regression in 1986. His second book; 'Secret Life: First hand accounts of UFO abductions' (1992) included testimony from 60 individuals and over 300 abduction events. This was followed by 'The Threat: Revealing the Secret Alien Agenda' in 1998.
In September of this year Dr Jacobs published a new book; 'Walking Among Us: The Alien Plan to Control Humanity'. He has kindly agreed to answer a series of questions about his work, the results of which are presented below:
Q - First of all thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. I wonder if you could start by telling us roughly how many people you have worked with over the years, is there a specific type of person who contacts you, or do you see more of a reflection of society in general?
A - Since 1986 I have worked with about 150 people and investigated about 1150 different abduction events. Others have worked with more people but I have worked with some for many years thereby learning more about what they were going through and also observing change over time.
I see a reflection of the society in general, although I do not work with anyone under the age of twenty-one. Of course, the person has to have access to a computer, iPhone, or tablet. They then must find my website, and then they have to find the questionnaire on it, fill it out, and then send it to me. If the person lives within 200 kilometers of me and if I think his or her questionnaire represents abduction events, I then contact them and set in motion a series of discussions with me. I go through the questionnaire with them, adding more information. Then I try to warn them of the consequences of finding out if they are abductees, and I am careful to tell them that we will not able to tell whether the person is an abductee or not until after doing hypnosis sessions with me. I also give them very strong warnings about learning that they are abductees; isolation, unable to tell co-workers for fear of being fired, sometimes unable to tell spouses for a multitude of reasons, and so on. I tell them that they are potentially on the verge of making an enormously important life-changing decision that can never be reversed. I give other warnings as well. I get about 25% of them to decide not to go forward. Those that do go forward with me come from different religions, different countries, different educational backgrounds, different intellectual abilities, different races, and so on. In short, they mirror the society in which we live.
Q - You have always made extensive use of hypnotic regression transcripts in your books, yet you acknowledge that the use of hypnosis is controversial in the eyes of many and certainly has its pitfalls. Could you tell us a little bit about your methods and what safeguards you have in place to prevent leading witnesses, inadvertently influencing testimony and confabulation?
A - Confabulation is the most important problem with uncovering abduction events. No one wants false memories thought to be true. I inadvertently believed that what a person told me was true in the very first session I did with her. When I did the first session over because of a tape recorder problem, she told me a different account of her abduction than she originally said. I knew then that I needed to put into effect a series of controls so that would not happen to me again. Thus, I ask questions that are calculated to trick the person into saying what I want them to say but are not true. I virtually never get people to say yes to those questions, they almost always say no. It is the “no” that I am looking for. This means that they are not "biting" on my false leading questions. I have other techniques to guard against confabulation as well. Also, if a person says something that no else has said, it does not become evidence until other people say the same thing without knowledge of the first person's account.
Q - In some ways Abduction research seems to be on the decline and sadly, Budd Hopkins, John Mack and a few others have passed away, do you continue to liaise with other UFO abduction researchers and compare notes?
A - There are only a few Americans who are agenda free (not New Age, or spiritual, or transcendent, or religious, etc,) who ask proper questions in the right way. Yvonne Smith is an excellent researcher in Los Angeles as is Jed Turnbull is in New York, and others. But in general, we are alone with our research. It is an awful situation. The problem is that the person who wants to do this work cannot be too young because abductees will not tell a young person about their reproductive procedures, etc., that occur on the UFO or elsewhere. I prefer to have a person at least in his/her 40s. The problem is that older person usually already has a career, family, responsibilities, etc. And when I talk at UFO conferences, most people in the audience are elderly. I see very few young enthusiastic people who are interested in UFOs and abductions and willing to wait until they reach the proper age to start doing hypnosis with abductees. They have lives to live. And, doing this type of research is time-consuming and difficult. I spend between four and five hours with each abductee every time we do a session. They can come to me as many times as they want. I have never charged a fee for any of the over 1000 sessions I have had since 1986. It is what I call a negative cash-flow business. When an abductee comes for a session with me, the money flows out of my bank account. So, for these reasons and a variety of other reasons-- people are less interested in UFOs than in decades past, etc.-- the few abduction researchers around today may be the last ones. I hope this is not true.
Q - A friend and colleague passed on the following for your consideration: "One of the things that strikes me when it comes to the research on abductions is the dichotomy between what some have called the 'negatives' and the 'positives.' What is remarkable, is that the dividing line between the two groups seems to fall along professional backgrounds: people who come from a care-giving background (doctors, nurses, psychiatrists, psychologists) tend to fall in the 'positives' group, while people with a background in e.g., law enforcement, intelligence, or history tend to belong to the 'negatives'. Now, both the 'negatives' and the 'positives' claim that their findings are based on the data they've collected. This could indicate that the dichotomy is actually rooted in different (professional) paradigms, and that this affects not only the interpretation of the data, but also goes deeper and even affects what one would consider relevant data. In other words, there is a danger of a professional, and probably subconscious or implicit, paradigmatic confirmation bias (for everyone involved), and this could be the cause of the divergent positions. Do you have any thoughts on that?"
A - There many problems in doing abduction research but two of the main ones are, approaching the subject with an agenda, usually New Age, transcendent, religious, spiritual, and healing for the Earth and/or humans. The other problem is letting those agendas guide the type of questions one asks in hypnosis. No one naturally knows how to do abduction hypnosis, whether they are a professional hypnotist, a hypnotherapist, a psychologist, psychiatrist, mental health professional, etc. They must be trained and there is a learning curve. The abduction phenomenon has profoundly different problems than standard hypnosis and memory retrieval. These arise as a result of remembering events for the first time--and those events were not supposed to be remembered. Many of the mental health people you mention, are not agenda-free and therefore their questions call for agenda-based answers. As a result it seems as if one abductee is validating another abductee’s accounts. I do not know any intelligence or law enforcement abduction researchers, but my guess is that their answers are only as good as their questions and therefore I am highly dubious about their abilities to properly ask questions regardless of negative answers. The problem is that the people with spiritual, etc., agendas are much greater in number than the few trained agenda-free researchers in America. If I have enough energy left, my next book will be a manual on how to do hypnosis with abductees. This is sorely needed.
Continued...