Rescuing People from Aliens (2012)

Daniel Loxton (Old) Skepticblog, Posts March 21, 2025abductees, alien abduction, aliens, psychology, skepticism, sleep paralysis, Susan Clancy 0 Comment

This article was originally published at the defunct Skepticblog.org on Jan 24, 2012 An archived version is available here.

Cover of Susan Clancy's book Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens (2005)

Working on refinements to my upcoming cryptozoology book with Skepticblog’s own Don Prothero (due out later in 2012) gave me a chance yesterday to dip back into Harvard psychologist Susan Clancy’s fascinating 2005 book about her studies of alien abductees, Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens. I thought I might share a couple of passages from the book here, partly because they dovetail so nicely with my own “Reasonableness of Weird Things” arguments.

Clancy’s area of primary interest is not skeptical investigation of paranormal claims, but false memory. To perform an ”honest broker” service as thorough and reliable guides to the evidence on paranormal topics, skeptical investigators are ethically obliged to seriously consider the (unlikely) possibility of paranormal phenomena. In her own work with abductees, Clancy’s obligations were different. She felt justified in taking it pretty much for granted that her subjects had not been kidnapped by space aliens. Abductees were, for Clancy, a proxy group to allow her to examine questions related to a separate population’s “recovered” memories of childhood sexual abuse. Read more

Things Skeptics Knew a Century Ago About How Thinking Goes Wrong (2014)

Daniel Loxton (Old) Insight blog, Posts March 13, 2025David Phelps Abbott, expectant attention, inattentional blindness, Joseph Jastrow, Michel-Eugene Chevreul, placebo effect, psychology, PT Barnum, skeptical history, skepticism, William Benjamin Carpenter 0 Comment

This article was originally published at the defunct Insight blog at Skeptic.com on Dec 29, 2014. An archived version is available here.

American psychologist and skeptic Joseph Jastrow. Image courtesy US National Library of Medicine, via Wikimedia Commons.

When better than the final days of the year to reflect on lessons of the past? Today, I’d like to share a small selection of quotes, each written over a century ago, which seem to me to bring the skepticism of our time and that of previous generations into a thought-provoking resonance. These passages employ concepts and jargon that are frequently used by skeptics today. This may strike us as prescient; however, I would argue that this apparent prescience is largely an illusory artifact of our own forgetfulness. In any event, these are a tiny sampling of conversations which were current in skepticism long before any of us were born.

I invite you to gaze into these passages, and reflect for a moment that in some ways the conceptual tools for skeptical examination of paranormal claims have changed little more in a century than the nature of imposture and superstition. Read more